


Six Lovers

by dreamsofghostsandstars



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Blood Kink, Canon Compliant, Clairvoyance, Flashbacks, Horror, Multi, Romance, Telepathy, Tragedy, Vampires, Villain PoV, costume porn, gratuitous history trivia, rough/violent sex, sense freak
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-21
Updated: 2016-12-10
Packaged: 2018-07-25 21:07:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 53,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7547279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamsofghostsandstars/pseuds/dreamsofghostsandstars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dorian spends moments with five lovers we know. He spends eternity with a demon that was forced on him. Disclaimer: I do not own <em>Penny Dreadful</em> or anything original to it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Miss Croft

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ShadowsGiveUsDepth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShadowsGiveUsDepth/gifts).



> It seems to me that, of all the major characters, Dorian gets the short end of the narrative stick. We sympathize with so many of the show's antiheroes and even villains because we're shown their histories and motivations, and we don't really get that with Dorian. Instead, we mainly see him through the POVs of his various lovers. So I'm writing this, a story that alternates between Dorian's POV of several canon relationships and his memories of the past. Each flashback leads to an earlier time, so that you'll eventually see him before his transformation. Friendly advice and constructive criticism are always appreciated.

**Dorian** slumped back in his chair, disappointed in the supposed miracles of modern technology. It wasn’t the fault of the science; he’d been photographed himself, and the first time had looked with great admiration upon the results. It was, he supposed, the fault of age and disillusionment. He had believed that to create photographs of someone else, to capture their image for all time in such a perfect way, might give him a sense of power or connection that he lacked in face-to-face communication with other humans. _Or in any other position, for that matter._ The thought had given him a little tingle in his fingertips when he decided to do it, but now it seemed just one more dismal turn in the sordid flow of his life, filthy water to forever stain a piece of paper.

Still, he had no better way to spend his day; this was less dull than some of his other options. He might as well make the most of it, however little that was. “Will you remove your corset, Miss Croft?”

She did so, but the motion seemed to shift her insides too much, and she coughed, hard and rough. Blood appeared on her lips. Blood, the essence of life and death. Perhaps he was in still ways his maker’s servant. For all the lives he had lived (and ended), for all the battlefields he had seen caked in the stinking dried crust of it, blood had never fully lost its luster to him, and neither had the games of life and death.

“There’s blood,” he noted, and she nervously reached up to wipe it away. Without a handkerchief or water, she just smeared it across her skin.

He leaned forward, feeling for the first time excitement, and not only in his fingertips. “Is it consumption?”

“Shall I go, sir?” she asked nervously. This one had bit of cleverness, despite her short life. She could sense his excitement, and on some level she understood it, but she couldn’t quite believe it, so instead she worried about petty mortal fears. She feared he was angry with her for spewing deadly germs across his parlor, and she knew he could likely get away with killing her for it.

But he had no intention of killing her; in fact, he felt oddly tender, the extremity of her situation bringing them together. She, too, was close too that edge, although she would one day fall off it. She _could_ fall off it.

“Not unless you want to.” He rose from the chair and approached her slowly. At times, Dorian Gray was a cruel bastard and knew it. In this moment, he did not want to frighten her, at least not in any way that was not a game to them both. A tingle, nothing more.

He reached for the drawstring of her cheap cotton shift. With the shift’s slit front, it would fall easily, as if by Aristotelian nature, from her smooth shoulders. “May I?” he asked.

“Sir, you shouldn’t,” she said, although she wished he would. Her pulse and flush played in harmony with his own, yet ahead of them, as if they were partners in a round and she had already begun the next stanza.

He broke into a smile, dissolving her concerns. They were already immaterial to him. “I don’t know the word.”

“I mean my sickness, sir,” she said, without conviction. For all the death she carried in her body, her eyes looked lively and lonely. He wondered if she hurried through her encounters to avoid giving away her illness, if she got through them without a single caress, and returned home to a lonely apartment, and drank through her money without a single touch.

Slowly, he licked the blood from her mouth. He didn’t think there could be a more definitive answer to her concerns, and she tossed them aside as she devoured his human closeness. She returned his kisses, pressed tighter to him, felt of him with her peasant’s hands. When he gently offered her the taste of her own life and death on his finger, she savored it as if it were opiates for her deathbed pains, or an ecstatic distillation of them. She had the temerity to seize his hand and move it to her cunt; he found himself for a moment standing behind her with his fingers servicing a woman who usually was paid for her services, and not minding at all. Her reactions thrilled him. People were, for all it was worth, the most fascinating things, and this desperate, grasping whore, who so clearly knew what she wanted and pursued it, was among the best of them.

A Flash Jack among the other ratters, to someone as far removed from her species as Dorian.

He wound up back in front of her, all their motions as graceful as if they were ballroom dancers; everything had grace when he was involved, and she seemed to appreciate it. The dance was no less lustful for its delicacy: Brona Croft reached for the ties to his dressing gown and ran her hands along his shoulders beneath it, so that the bullion-heavy satin slid from his skin as easily as the cheap cotton shift had from hers, until his garment lay in a dark green pool on the marble floor. She hungered and she hunted. There was something of a predator, something fierce and devouring, in her.

Still, he asked one more time. Perhaps he wanted to make sure that the strongest connection he managed to mortals, although still frustratingly pathetic, was real; perhaps he asked in honor of the questions the Master hadn’t asked him.

“You don’t mind?” He pulled his face back slightly, giving her room to think.

Think she did, for a moment. He watched her mull over the strangeness, the sin, the disturbing nature of his interest in death, and decide to take what she wanted after all.

“No,” she said. She sounded almost surprised by her own desires.

Dorian had heard that tone many times in his ancient existence.

“Expose your plates, Mr. Froyle,” he called to the photographer, not caring what Froyle thought of the escalating debauchery, so long as he took the pictures.

He lifted one of her legs and pressed into her, finding her sloppy-wet. She winced at his ferocity even as she dove headfirst into it, squeezing her fists and making sounds that were part whimpers, part exultation. In this she was nothing more than an ordinary woman, and he reached to draw a different sort of blood.

“I’ve never fucked a dying creature before,” he said, as other men might murmur pillow sweet nothings. “Do you feel things more deeply, I wonder? Do you feel pain?”

It pained her to hear his words, he could tell that it did, it ripped the scab from the wound and he could see the blood. Yet there was more to her than that simple pain. She had a rage so deep that it could fuel joy, and he heard it in her voice when she responded, as to a challenge rather than a defeat, “Do you?”

Her spirit and vigor actually surprised him, and he did not calculate the grin he felt appearing on his face. “Find out.”

She raked across his back, hard enough to cut stripes into the flesh, a sting that reminded him of the mortality he could never have, the weakness he was long since beyond. Her strength would have surprised him, had he not already taken her measure. She would throw all she had into life, for as long as she had it. And there was something more to her, perhaps fury, perhaps a thwarted need for power. Its faded portrait clawed like a lioness. It was a shame that she was nothing but human; she would have made a splendid goddess, from the days of the old gods, or when people remembered them with the heads of night predators.

Her cries grew faster and louder as he moved within her, almost completely in and out with each thrust, his rhythm a startling staccato even in its preternatural grace. She was approaching release, but she was only human. The hand of death blocked the moment, and she coughed again, spilling blood, firing it, with such volume and power that it ran like rain down his face. For a moment, even Dorian was surprised, but mostly because he could not believe his luck. Death, the death that he could not find, dripped over his mouth and before his eye, and it was glorious, an enemy that could never defeat him, a goal that he could never attain, right here and surrounding him in the beauty of a setting he had arranged.

Dorian kissed her deeply, and Miss Croft kissed him back, hard, wanton, abandoned in a need as strong as a human could know.


	2. The Last of the Wick

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Flashback to Dorian's life as an Anglo-Irishman caught up in the War of the Three Kingdoms.

Ireland, 1649

 

**“Prisoners?”** asked the soldier. Beet Pete, everyone called him, but Henry Leblanc was unsure if Peter were his real name, or if his nickname came solely from the unfortunate rufous color of his skin.

Henry downed the remaining broth in his cup and wondered how this had happened again. It seemed, at times, that he did nothing but try to stay out of wars, with their senseless killing and occasional treaties that were never really more than fragile truces, yet it also felt as if he did nothing but get trapped in them. Even dodging life as a soldier, he had, somehow, found himself called upon by those who fought to deliver them advice.

“I hear they trapped a hundred, perhaps a few more,” he answered Pete. “If Smithson could write as well as he drank, I could tell you more precisely.”

“What’ll you have done with them?” asked Pete. He glanced out the door of the tattered tent, probably wanting to get back to one of the games that served as a diversion on this wretched campaign.

It occurred to Henry to wonder why Pete even cared. It was certainly hard for Henry himself to think of a reason. The war that had engulfed all three kingdoms was beyond reason; Protestant and Catholics fought one another or fought united against Cromwell, almost at random yet with deadly ferocity, and everyone’s land was laid waste in this miserable country. He wondered when his men would decide to turn on him. Ireland had been a good place to be an Protestant of English “parentage,” until the fool king, whose head had been cut off within the past year, had sent Wentworth over to meddle in everyone’s affairs.

Of course, they “laying waste” question loomed largest. He could hardly afford to feed prisoners. Even if he had been willing to invest his personal funds in this storm of folly, he would have been hard put to find food enough for them, and he certainly wasn’t going to plunder the local civilians to feed their enemies. That was the surest way to wind up shot, again, and while he was almost past caring about such wounds for their own sake, he had no desire to explain their ineffectiveness to the ignorant.

Then again, he was tired of this persona anyway. Surely three centuries of honoring his late lover’s name were enough. “I suppose it depends. If my men offered their word, they will honor it.”

“But how will you feed them?”

_I won’t. Once I’ve caused you to starve for the honor you claim to hold dear, I’ll run away to eat stuffed swan and dance in the finest ballroom in the finest palace I can find in all the world._ “Leave me to work it out, my friend. We cannot break our word and expect any more surrenders.”

“The English are getting more vicious,” Pete noted. “They deserve what’s coming to them.”

“And yet that never makes a bit of difference in what actually comes to any of us,” Henry replied. “Go play your dice, Pete, or watch the dogs rip each other’s throats out. I’m tired of games tonight.”

He collapsed back on his makeshift bed in his makeshift tent. At least it was better than anyone else’s, seeing as how he had guessed the necessity of his departure some weeks in advance; and any tent outside of city walls was better than the strongest castle inside them, with all the sieges happening in this country. That was why, despite his complete disinterest in the military ranks, he had accepted the deference his neighbors showed him for his wealth and cleverness, and participated in this march. One more sort of camp follower, this time in the lead.

Smithson reached him not an hour later. He’d gotten skinny enough to look sick, and he wasn’t even drunk; the supply situation was growing dire indeed. Henry offered him a drink and then man took it greedily, smearing mud on the pewter.

Henry listened to the story of how the Irish soldiers had somehow trapped the English, who had managed to be both frightful and cowardly, through cunning and and courage. It was long and tedious, and Henry had had his fill of tedium for the century. He intended to spend the rest of it doing nothing aside from patronizing beautiful whores and gifted artists.

“Smithson, what were your terms?” he asked. It was enough.

“No terms, sir. They’re stuck in the pit and they can’t get out.”

Henry quietly admitted to himself that the soldiers had indeed been clever. He might as well give them what they wanted. “If they accepted no terms, then they will receive no mercy. After all,” and he looked around him at the faded mortal world, “they’re going to die anyway.”

Smithson gave him an odd look, but also a jubilant one. Henry could only imagine what Smithson himself would have made of such blood thirst before the sieges started. Whole garrisons had been slaughtered after surrender, by the reports, and Smithson’s brother had died—before or after surrendering, Henry didn’t know. He hadn’t been a drunk then, any more than he’d been a murderer, but time changed everyone, everyone whom it hadn’t yet twisted into their final form.

He shot himself that night, when it was black and hard to see the details, but when everyone would remember the shot and some the tumble. The slope toward the water was so gentle that, through the agony, he scoffed at them for thinking he wasn’t still moving himself. It didn’t matter. They believed it, and so Henry Leblanc was dead.

With that finality to this life came something of finality for the truly dead Henry, Henri Leblanc, the man who had died wrinkled and stinking of age centuries ago, but who had loved a beautiful boy from the countryside. A fake boy, older by a millennium than Henri, but nonetheless the figure of adoration, and the boy had returned an echo of it. Though that boy had found momentary pleasure with a hundred men since the, Henri had been the last true love.

He had not wept when Henri died, had not wept in the three hundred years since any more than in the three hundred before, but he wept now. Not for Henri himself, he had no pretense to that, but simply for the fact that Henri was the last. There would never be another, not until he found another immortal. He did not wish for Henri to be the last; he would have liked to have loved again; but that part of himself had burned out, the last mite of wick consumed; and he knew his pain’s fragility by how effortless it was to control it. As he rolled down the bank, and drifted in the slow current, as he remembered the man he had loved, even as he savored the pale feeling of grief and tears, he had not the slightest difficulty preventing himself from giving away any sound that would prove he had not died.

Henry Leblanc was dead, and there was no one to take his place.

**For** all his luck, the beautiful boy had not survived since before the Crucifixion by taking foolish chances with his portrait. He had secreted it in a virtual Ark of the Covenant in a cave, far safer than any castle in this climate, and knew the route to it from anywhere in Ireland. He spent three days and nights sneaking through the countryside, dodging the sight of everyone, his clothes smelling of both blood and the river, and his chest in agony. He would have liked to have missed himself, but the blood had sealed his deception.

_Blood, what else?_

He had to pilfer an ax along the way, for he had not left one in the cave. A thief could not simply pick his vault’s locks, as it had none. It was heavy oak over solid lead buried in the soil, too heavy to be easily moved or opened. Even he could not lift the heavy lid of the lead. Instead, he had to bash his way through wood and lead alike. He wondered why he did not care what the splinters might do to the painting, why he was not more careful with the blows of his ax, until, staring at the face of the demon, he experienced a revelation.

He didn’t want to protect the portrait anymore. He still wanted to control it, but not to use it. He wanted to destroy it.

It knew what he was thinking, recoiled. It believed he could do it. By the light of a single candle, he saw its hateful face staring at him, frightened and malicious. It hated him, for not being its beast of burden, for making it bear his sins rather than becoming the puppet in its schemes. And yet, despite that, it would rather live on in his pleasures and pains than die with him.

It could not scream; its horrified face juxtaposed comically with its soundlessness. The monster, his monster, trapped for all eternity, in silence as he reveled. He had enjoyed that irony. But now the revelry was over, and a different silence to begin.

He swung the ax.

The portrait held.

He swung again.

The portrait held.

For the first time in hundreds of years, the boy felt the stirrings of panic. The portrait stared back at him, now realizing its salvation, mocking him, even, he thought, leering at him. He would have clawed its eyes out with his bare hands, then, but his hands seemed even less likely than the ax to work, and this must work. He could not be trapped in this world, in this life, to this monster, for eternity.

He carried the candle very carefully to the portrait. Irrational it might be, but he felt almost as though the candle flame had a spirit that would respond to his worship, that the sacred fire would save him, and he called out for whatever god rejected such abominations to cleanse them both from the Earth.

The flame touched the painting.

The painting did not burn.

It smiled at him, an expression worse than its usual scowls, and the boy knew then that Hell was real, only it was not a place, it was captivity.

He had subdued the creature to his will before Christ walked the Earth, but he and it were both still bound to the plane where their maker—he refused to think the word _Master_ —dwelt.

And that was everlasting.


	3. Someone Else

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ethan and Dorian's encounter, from Dorian's POV.

**Something** about Mr. Chandler had effected Dorian’s senses. He knew, by now, when he encountered a creature out of the ordinary; it would have a sort of psychic perfume, unique to its kind, where a human had nothing but ordinary sweat and oil. Vanessa Ives’s was more powerful and delectable than any he had previously encountered, but he could sense a hint of strangeness in Mr. Chandler as well, a note of something powerful and beastly that enveloped the man—trapped him, Dorian thought, from the gentleness and pain that radiated from him.

Dorian found him still outside the theater, the pain that he had sensed growing ever stronger as the distance between them closed. Dorian enjoyed it: He had to work so hard to manufacture feeling of his own, these days.

“Mr. Chandler, the play is about to start,” he called out. Miss Croft was nowhere to be seen; no doubt she had scurried away after some petty lovers’ quarrel, adding to Ethan’s misery. Her own, as well, Dorian thought, if Ethan loved her as deeply as he appeared to.

“ Mr. Chandler? Are you all right?” he asked, more gently. _Are you any worse than you have to be, considering that I already know that you hate yourself?,_ he thought. He couldn’t have explained saying that, though. He suspected that, while Ethan was an enigma to him, the entire preternatural world was an enigma to Ethan.

It took another moment for the American to speak. “Do you ever wish you could be someone else?” he asked. “Just run away from your life?”

The elegant simplicity of Ethan’s summation delighted him. “All the time.” _But I never can, because I am so many people,_ and, _So I try, every few generations._ He eyed Ethan, wondering how much trouble the man was worth, but certain that he was more worth it than another episode of fake blood and trampled orange peels. Of course, Miss Ives was worth more than everyone else in London put together, but she had set the course for the evening, and it was a restrained one. Dorian would get nowhere with her mysteries tonight. “You want to be someone else? Come with me.” He wasn’t actually sure how he would fulfill it, just that his person always brought out the parts of the mind that people usually hid.

He had learned, over time, the nature of his own charm. It was less that the his monstrous aspect tempted people—it was the original boy that did all that— than that it freed them from the fear of succumbing to their temptations.

If Mr. Chandler wanted to be someone else, Dorian could give him that. It would only take a few nudges.

Mr. Chandler thought it over, clearly aware that this was out of the ordinary. They were, after all, total strangers. But then, they were both extraordinary as well, even if Ethan had only a vague and distant grasp on that fact.

“Is there a drink involved?” he asked.

Dorian gave him his most inviting smile. There certainly could be drinks involved, although none of it would have the slightest ability to ameliorate Dorian’s good sense—and, outside of field surgery, that was the greatest use of liquor. “Many,” he promised.

“What about Miss Ives?” asked Ethan. He was smitten, too. Dorian felt no jealousy; one worshipper did not complain that his pew contained another.

“She doesn’t want to be anyone else,” Dorian stated. Miss Ives’s exterior was a controlled version of what she held inside, not a fake one. It was as if water held itself, perfectly tense and perfectly still all around the sides, in the shape of a vase, with no glass to hold it. She didn’t want to break through glass; she wanted to find her true shape. Dorian would help her do that, but not tonight.

“You’re on, Mr Gray,” Ethan said simply, and Dorian knew that his gruff Americanisms were as much a trap as whatever monster the man contained.

Whatever Ethan was that he wanted to escape, it was violent and brutish and hard, the thing that he had wanted Miss Croft to not see. The best way to grind away at a diamond was with another diamond.

**So** Dorian took him to the ratting den, in a tight cellar that smelled of too many people’s breaths and liquor of all grades. Most of the people were quite wealthy; they could have been at the theater as easily as Dorian himself; but there was something about real death and real blood that no amount of shrill screaming and colored syrup could approach. For many of these people, too, there was something alluring about the proximity to real human poverty, about knowing that each of the sums they threw about in the ratting den could have fed the people at street level for a week.

There were reasons why, in life after life, Dorian chose to be wealthy.

Ethan was nervous in the den, with an animal’s fear of being surrounded, and a human’s guilt for what was to happen. He had enough intuition to recognize that this crowd wanted death, then. He fidgeted so much that he bobbed between people in the crowd, but Dorian didn't care. He could feel Ethan following him. Dorian’s line may have been slack, but his hook was secure.

They reached the pen in time to stand side by side as the rats tumbled from their buckets, squeaking in anger and fear. Dorian wished he could hold every one of them, touch them, even taste them. Although he knew the portrait was the source of his true power, he felt sometimes as though he could absorb something of the natural lives of dying things, as though their departing ghosts flew through his and left traces. Knowing them would have added spice to the experience, fanciful as it was.

After so many sessions, Dorian immediately recognized the first dog brought out, a cranky terrier that tried to nip its handler’s face. “That’s Flash Jack, the best there is,” he informed Ethan, who was becoming more nervous by the second. “A true artist at the craft. Once killed a hundred and twenty rats in six minutes, ten seconds.” He motioned to a harried server. “Can I have ninety-seven?” After all, this wasn’t going to be quite as long a bout.

He was unsurprised that Ethan made no bets. Indeed, Dorian thought Mr. Chandler was already sweating more than the stuffy room would indicate. The American still clung to Dorian’s presence, even seemed riveted by the imminent death, but in a strange way, with guilt and agony, as if he were a ghost looking upon both his own corpse and his victims.’

_He’s_ seen bloodier spectacles than this, Dorian thought. If Miss Croft had wanted to be a predator but lacked the claws, Mr. Chandler was a predator whose claws turned against him.

Flash Jack didn’t make a fool of Dorian. He broke a rat’s neck at least every three seconds, flinging them aside. Blood flew from the ones thats veins Jack had bitten and decorated excited men in the audience, who looked pleased by the challenge of hiding their activities when they left. Dorian would not have bothered. The rats had never known how lucky they were, to die this quickly. The terrier was a far gentler executioner than the smiling housekeeper with her poisons.

Ethan was no more impressed than the rats. Dorian feigned ignorance of his guest’s discomfort, letting it boil unattended, but he could sense it, panic and shame and disgust aimed not at the crowd but at Ethan’s own self. His gentle side loathed his beastly side and manly shell alike, and all three were excited, pleasantly or not, by the activities in the den. His breathing grew faster, and more sweat appeared on his skin than seemed commensurate with the stuffy air.

Mr. Chandler fled the scene, not heading far. He’d likelier run into the bar than outside, given his own desperation for Dorian’s guidance out of his own life.

Dorian heard a scuffle. He didn’t let it disrupt his observation of this game of death. Once he had grown tired of blood sports; now he knew that that made no difference. There were only games and death and the people who lived in them. And Dorian himself, and perhaps Miss Ives, living outside them, watching and betting on the players. As for Mr. Chandler, one of the elite of those trapped in the pen, the fight would be good for him. The man needed an outlet, and it seemed incredible to Dorian that most nights he never saw a companion in a brawl before ten.

The fight to the side continued, even as Flash Jack worked his way through the rats. A nasty fistfight, that was for sure; Ethan might even need a bit of tending. He probably didn’t get sympathy for his bruises very often, and he probably accepted it even less often. From Dorian, he could take it. Everyone could.

“Ninety-seven!” called a man with chalky palms, as the time ran out. Dorian spared a look at the brawl as he collected his winnings. Ethan should’ve won, even against two or three opponents, but instead he was taking a beating. Dorian wondered how quickly he healed. He’d’ve bet every penny in the den that it would be faster than any ordinary human would.

Apparently, even the ratting den had limits on accepted behavior. By the time Dorian reached Ethan, the bouncers were dragging two men off Ethan. Another lay sprawled an moaning on the floor; Dorian couldn’t tell if that was due more to a punch he’d taken or the alcohol he’d drunk. Ethan looked almost disappointed—more, almost _panicked_ —to be saved. It seemed he still felt he deserved worse.

“Thank you,” Dorian said to the bouncers. When he offered Ethan his hand to rise, Ethan put hardly an ounce of weight on him, but still took it as though thrown a lifeline. He looked a touch incredulous when Dorian gestured a shoulder toward him, permission to lean on the smaller man. Only when Dorian smiled as invitingly yet benignly as he could did Ethan accept, after a fashion. Though his breath smelled of whiskey, and bruises swelled on his face and knuckles, Mr. Chandler required no help to walk. All he required was the illusion of need to hug Dorian.

“Shall I take you to my home to get you cleaned up, Mr. Chandler?” asked Dorian, softly. He wanted to spend more time with this strange creature who seemed to possess as many facets as himself; and he wanted to see what happened when the grit wore through the surface. “I have failed as a guide through this city’s society. Let me atone for my misdeeds.”

“Your home have a drink?” Ethan said, with an almost-smile.

Dorian smiled back, as he had when making his earlier promise. “As many as you like.”

**Dorian’s** mansion was not the height of fashion, not because it was too old-fashioned, but because the rest of London had not yet taken it up as a fashion. He had experimented with the greatest indulgences of the age, had piled chintz on velvet to an extent that would raise a harlot’s eyebrows, and had tired of it. Now he lived in a kind of extravagant simplicity, his spare walls devoid of gilding and elaborate molding, yet decorated by portraits worth even more than the house itself. Every room of the bottom story was floored in shining marble, and families of ten lived in apartments smaller than one of his bathrooms.

He half-sat on the vanity, a vantage point from which he could observe Ethan’s expressions in both the flesh and the mirror. Mr. Chandler’s bruises were already shrinking, faster than normal, but Dorian waited for Ethan’s own judgment on that.

He imagined that Vanessa was right about Mr. Chandler’s theatrical skills. Confronted with the evidence of his monstrosity, the healing taking place in the reflection before his eyes, he didn’t flinch. Even Dorian didn’t catch an obvious outward reaction, just… unease, a mingling of confusion and self-loathing and pragmatic dismissal of unwanted thoughts. And a disproportionate gratitude for the small kindness of a place to clean his wounds and a person to stay near him while he did.

“I’m awfully sorry,” Dorian apologized. It wasn’t entirely a lie. He lived to charm and please almost as much as he did to manipulate and gloat.

“I have a temper,” Ethan said, which Dorian took for a benediction, not to mention a comic understatement.

Dorian wondered what to say next. He was so used to ordinary people, ordinary conversation, and Ethan was at a different level than they. Of course, it might not matter much, so long as Ethan believed that it was friendly attention, offered to him.

“I won, by the way,” Dorian tried. “Flash Jack. Ninety-seven, right on the nose.” Because he knew that Ethan understood what it meant to be tired of one’s life, he continued, “Not that it matters.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not as diverting as it used to be. Once you get used to something… why bother? It’s just repetition.”

Ethan looked to the cologne shelf. “You like your colognes.” That was almost as much of an understatement as _“I have a temper.”_ Dorian let the comparison go, delighted by this sensuous side of his guest. “How do you choose?” asked Ethan.

“Depends on how I feel,” Dorian explained. “Or how I want to feel, I suppose. Different aromas make you feel differently, don’t they? Citrus and sandalwood produce one feeling, lavender and musk another. Jasmine, citron, mint… Each produces a different sensation. A different you.” Of course, it was bad form to expect a stranger to invest too much thought in one’s different selves. “I get carried away.”

“Good for you,” Ethan said, and he sounded sincere. Here was a man who desperately wished that he could get carried away. Perhaps that explained his devastation at his quarrel with Brona Croft. Such a man would look to a woman to collect his passions when they wanted to slip away.

Dorian did not have the answer to Ethan’s lack of grand passions, but he had found that absinthe carried most people away rather quickly. He prepared it meticulously, with slowly melting ice and an abundance of sugar. Having chosen to be a host tonight, he would do it well, would be himself well.

Mr. Chandler was taking in the pictures on Dorian’s walls. Dorian suspected he had seen prints of most of them in his schoolbooks, and wondered if he could recognize these for the originals.

“Do you like pictures?”

Ethan realized that his facade had cracked. He shouldn’t have felt badly for that; most people would have thought his appraisal nothing more than gawking at unfamiliar sophistication. “Mostly the ones of the buxom ladies that hang above saloon bars,” he said, a touch more drawl than usual in his voice.

Dorian laughed. “You play your part to perfection.”

“What part’s that?” Ethan asked, playing dumb—and playing it quite well, Dorian thought.

“Rude, mechanical, rugged Westerner.” Not a part Dorian would have chosen for himself. “But I suppose we all play parts.”

“What’s yours?” Ethan asked.

Dorian could have given Ethan any of hundreds of true answers to that, but only one mattered. Only one explained what he was, what he was not, ever since he had accepted the portrait as a part of himself. That the thing suffused him now, that it was as much him as his original soul, was a fact he no longer resisted. He could even love it and hate it now, not the way one hated an opposing soldier, but the way one loved and hated something closer than a lover, the way that he loved and hated himself.

“Human,” he responded.

The absinthe was ready now, chilled and sweetened. Dorian offered Ethan one tumbler and took another. “Do you know absinthe?”

Mr. Chandler took his. “Never had the pleasure.”

Dorian stood. “Then we shall toast your first taste.” Any new experience called for a toast to something precious and magnificent. “To the most mysterious thing in London: Miss Vanessa Ives.”

He didn’t miss Ethan’s reaction, a look of stupefaction totally unjustified by his supposed connection to the lady in question. He hadn’t exhibited anything like that jealousy in response to Dorian’s earlier implication that the two men had both received Miss Croft’s services. But Ethan’s gentle side won out for the moment, and he made no more violent acknowledgment of his jealousy. He downed his absinthe in peace, if not understanding.

Dorian laughed—but not to hard, not enough to frighten Ethan farther into his shell or his bear’s den or whatever he called his shelter of frontier masculinity—when Ethan let out a breath as if unfamiliar with such potent liquors. It didn’t seem to dissuade Ethan from the drink, although he took a smaller sip the next time.

A few drinks later, Ethan was wandering about the room, with an aimless relaxation that might have been part from the alcohol, but was likely more from Dorian’s own presence. “Do you have a favorite?”

“I do,” replied Dorian, honest as ever, “but it’s not in here.”

“I’ve seen some paintings that I like… a lot, actually,” Ethan said. “Don’t know if they count. There’s an Anasazi village in Colorado. This is an Indian tribe that died out, long time ago. The built this town up the side of the mountain, in cliffs. They left behind paintings from thousands of years ago. No people, just animals, the sun, the moon… Whatever they thought important enough to, uh, remember.”

“Why do you like them?” Dorian asked, intrigued by the history, but enthralled by the man recounting it.

“They’re primitive,” Ethan said, then, as if something about it hurt him, “No. They’re honest.”

“Can art be honest, do you think?” asked Dorian. What answer would Mr. Chandler, in his youth and experience and intelligence and pain, give to that?

Ethan hesitated. “You’re the expert there,” he said, with a touch of bitterness. As if it called for more, he downed the rest of his absinthe.

Dorian could indeed get carried away. “I think music can. Perhaps only music, because… it’s ephemeral. That’s the paradox. Music is a phantasm, but it’s true.”

“You know your music, too,” Ethan observed. He seemed slightly disgusted by Dorian’s knowledge; perhaps more by the contradiction between such knowledge and Dorian’s fragile, youthful appearance.

“Oh, I’m bored with it,” Dorian answered, gratified to have someone around with the wit to feel the _off_ -ness of Dorian’s existence, even if they hadn’t learned to accept monstrosity for the strength it was. “I know every groove of every cylinder. There’s nothing new.” He stirred, then, remembering the wave and crest and crash of the “Liebestod,” and moved to put in the cylinder. “There is one, though. I would ask you if you know Wagner, but you’d only pretend you don’t.” That drew a self-knowing chuckle from Ethan. “It’s the ‘Liebestod,’ from _Tristan and Isolde,”_ Dorian said as it began to play, drama and beauty and a pain so intimate it became erotic beginning to flow through them. He spoke somewhat distantly, not crowding Ethan’s mind any more than his bodily space. “Literally translated, it means ‘love-death.’ It’s from the very end of the opera. Isolde’s lover is dead before her. They’re on a beach. The waves are rolling in. You can hear that in the music. And her heartbreak,” he said, catching Ethan’s eyes, and seeing no reason for disappointment in the American’s level of feeling, “you can hear that, too.”

He had no words more eloquent than the aria itself, now; he could only look at Ethan’s face, turmoil obvious on it as his different selves warred with one another, as the rolled in and out and crested and crashed at different times, just a little, the way smaller earthquakes often presaged greater ones. _Yes, I feel it too, yes, I am responsible, yes, I did this too you, I brought you here and manipulated you and brought you to this point, yes, I am here, to accept whatever demons you have brought in with you,_ Dorian’s eyes said, and Ethan read him.

Close to tears, Ethan crossed the room and seized Dorian by the throat, not quite hard enough to cut off all his air. He was losing control, but it had not yet fully slipped. Hopefully it would, _the rise and the crest and the crash,_ for Dorian wanted to witness it. He could do nothing except stare at Ethan blankly, not pushing him in any particular direction, just waiting for Ethan to reach his own crest.

With a yank of his arm, Ethan pulled Dorian to him and kissed him. It occurred to Dorian that they had nearly chipped their teeth, there, and still Ethan wanted more. It was fierce and angry and yet the need and pain behind it called for comfort more than revenge.

For a moment, Dorian wondered if Ethan intended to rape him, but it wasn’t going to come to that. Dorian kissed him back, not struggling when Ethan pushed him far enough away to get an easy grip on his shirt and rip it open. Mother-of-pearl buttons scattered on the floor as Ethan, tears running down his cheeks, dragged it down Dorian’s arms, almost knocking him to his knees, and the threads at the wrist gave way and they both let it fall away from them, as if the thin silk were too painful a barrier to the closeness Ethan craved with Dorian’s flesh.

Ethan paused then, looking startled, even stunned. Maybe he had thought that Dorian would reject him, throw him out with scratches on his face; Dorian didn’t think he would have carried a forceful assault through to completion. At any rate, Dorian planned to be present for the entire catharsis.

One of the little waves had crested and crashed, he thought, but there was so much more. He reached for Ethan’s waistcoat and unbuttoned it, with a light touch. _Let someone take care of you, Ethan. Experiment with something new tonight,_ he thought, and Ethan cooperated.

Ethan’s waistcoat and shirt slid to the floor, gracefully and undamaged, unlike Dorian’s silk shirt. Both bare above the waist now, they kissed again. Salt smudged from Ethan’s face onto Dorian’s, but the bigger man seemed to bear no ill will. One of his large hands supported Dorian’s head, an unnecessary gesture, except for the fact that Ethan wanted to believe that he could be tender and be treated tenderly. He kissed with the passion of a man who needed love, and while Dorian could not give him that, he could give him the pretense of it. A painting of it, the person who should have been. So he returned Ethan’s kisses with all the affection and acceptance of millennia of such pretense, while the music resolved about them, and their new aria began.


	4. The Master's Words

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In eleventh-century Egypt, Dorian seeks out information regarding his origins.

Egypt, 1090 

 

**The** Andalusian could not fault the woman before him for finding him odd. Many men had been startled by a knife held to the throat by a member of the Banu Sasan in the dead of night, but he imagined that few had laughed in their surprise.

“If you plan to use that, child, I advise you to go ahead. I may forgive you for slitting my throat, but I won’t forgive you for wasting my time. Not tonight.”

“Give me your gold, now,” she repeated slowly. “All of it.”

“My dear, if I acquiesced to that request, it would ruin the currency system, and surely you don’t want that. But you can have the remainder of what we agreed upon, just as soon as I have my purchase. Here. You can look through my purse.”

The woman carried the purse over to a torch-holding accomplice. “It seems to be all here.”

“It is,” the Andalusian confirmed.

She gave him a strange, challenging look. “What do you think will keep us from running away with this gold, now that you’ve handed it to us?”

The Andalusian smiled. “The fact that I could kill you all before you’d taken ten steps. Now, may I please inspect my goods?”

She returned, carrying another bag lifted off another assistant. The Andalusian opened the sack carefully, concerned that the papers within might be fragile, and peered at it.

It wasn’t ancient Egyptian, which he had expected, but it was something else very odd: Some words Latin, some in Arabic, some in Aramaic, as if designed to thwart the intentions of readers who hadn’t learned all those languages.

He considered the possibilities. He thought it was likely what it appeared, the story he wanted, told in code. While he was sure the Banu Sasan could have scrounged up an Aramaic speaker to create gibberish about a demon, he doubted any of its members could have so precisely guessed the nature of his interests.

“I thank you,” he said, with a nod to encompass all the thieves in his gratitude. He turned and headed home without a backward glance.

**The** “Andalusian” had acquired, thirty years ago, a decent house in a district of Cairo populated mainly by well-off merchants, and paid off assistants in the House of Knowledge to alert him to the arrival of any forbidden documents. He had seen, in that time, an endless supply of false witchery designed to gull a few coins from the sick and the lovelorn, but not yet anything resembling what he wanted. Hopefully, this would prove more helpful. His neighbors’ comments on his unchanging appearance were beginning to change from envious to suspicious.

Although the portrait room lay at the center of his house, he pulled all the room’s curtains closed as soon as he had lit the candles. By their expensive light, he carefully laid out the frail papyrus papers. They were genuinely old, not cheap, and they had been kept away from spilling cups and greasy hands. Ignored or cherished, he could not tell which.

They were arranged in a scroll, not a book format, but they were in order. It was a rare event that made him shiver, but his fingers trembled and his palms shook. Most people never knew what their lives meant; most never needed to. But he had to know, or he would never have a chance to live his life on his own, separated from that repulsive presence.

_Free,_ he thought. _Perhaps I can be free._

It took him a moment to adjust to the flow between languages, the pulse of the changes, more so because the dialect of Aramaic was slightly different from what he had once spoken. A little newer, he guessed, by two or three centuries. But it was coherent enough, and he felt a chill as he realized whose words he was reading.

_The Master. My Master. I have no Master. My… commissioner._

“In all the millennia of my accursed entrapment on this Earth, I have created one being which was entirely unique. The priests of the secret nature of Amun-Ra faithfully fulfilled my instructions”— _pain and terror and he was tied to an altar while the fanged men covered in parchment leered at him_ —“to the very letter to save my poor servant, who could not, it seemed, live except in stasis on this world. Wretched creature, who followed me from Heaven, only to find himself more imprisoned than I was, unable even to pursue the fleshly pleasures that I could. Such a life, such an unending, tortuous death. What a curse it was for him, to be an idol but not a god.” _Yes, pity the thing that violates my very soul._

“I pitied him, I, who dream of dances through the blood of mankind with my goddess and queen. He had been so faithful to me, and for thousands of years I failed him. I, cast down to this Earth, traveled it far and wide. I found new joys and new revels, while my follower remained unmoving, aware of all that happened but far from it, in his shallow cage.

“So I conceived a plan to save him. It was not, I concede, my finest plan; but I had none better, nor do I now. The priests of the secret nature took a beautiful young man, a man who might have been created after my own nature, the red blood flowing from his joy in every night of life. A fool who found release for that joy in absurd Dionysian mysteries, yes, one with a slight and childlike grasp of what the Master of all pleasures felt, but still a creature of temptation, who yielded to it and inspired others to yield in equal portion.

“They bit the beautiful young man with their fangs and let their venom corrupt him,”— _I am corrupted, rotting as from a snakebite; no, that is only the portrait, I am myself, I remain human, it is only the portrait that is wrong_ —“but did not drink his blood. Instead, they left him before the portrait, and with all the power of their chants, and all my power that I could channel through them, they drew the portrait out, not entirely, but only in a tiny amount.

“A gray or black fog seeped outward, and I knew its intent when it moved to his throat. I could still feel something of my minion’s sensations, then, before my desperation separated him from me forever. The fog was wet as a tongue when it licked they boy’s throat, his arms, all the veins marked with tender purple bruises around brilliant red portals to the blood, and it entered him through the punctures. The blood soaked the fog; it trailed back into the portrait, as ink blotting paper. And the fog soaked the accursed boy as well.

“I was overjoyed, as much as I can be until I find my beloved. My faithful servant would now be as free as I to enjoy this world’s bounty until we could claim that of Heaven.

“But it was not as I thought. In one instant, all was well; in the next, my servant’s presence was gone from my mind. Where was his desire, his longing? Not freed in the boy, that was certain, for he fought its will. He hissed at the priests and, upon being cut free of his bonds, attempted to kill one, though he had no idea how. It could appear as if the boy had claimed my servant’s power for himself, and now forced him to his will, rather than the other way around.

“Yet that was not entirely true. Gone from my mind was my faithful servant; yet I sensed the presence of something else, something that had never been before and should never have been. It was neither my servant nor the boy. I wanted to kill the boy, to free the servant, but I could not. My priests even cut off his head, and the portrait shuddered in pain, and its power flowed into the boy, creating a body the same as his old one.

“In the coupling of the demon and the boy, something new was born, something perhaps stronger than either of them. It has two wills, still, pushing and pulling between icon and flesh, but neither icon nor flesh has a pure nature. Each has corrupted the other, and the tie between them may never be broken. Neither the priest’s chanting in their ancient tongue nor the new language of the gods had any effect to break their bonds.

“So I let this bastard child free. It pleases me, at times, to hear of the things he has done, to know that he still carries something of our old desires: To tempt, to sin, to bring others with him into the world of blood and dreams. In one way he mirrors me, that he loves earthly sins while constantly grasping at ideas of the eternal. He, too, can imagine no Heaven without pleasures that El counts as sins. He can even sense, in a faint and vague way, those beings whose notes ring just out of harmony with the mortal realm, and he loves them. But he has no destiny that I can sense, no role in the coming transformation of Earth into both Heaven and Hell. He is simply what he is: Not a human, not a demon, just a licentious and sordid little monster.

“I have wondered, sometimes, if our paths must cross by sheer chance. It would, as I long ago realized, not be from destiny. There is no future written for him. Yet surely his inchoate half-human lusts will draw him to those who matter, and perhaps, by accident, he will one day be of use to me. If he creates such an advantage, I would be wise to use it, for he will serve no other purpose.

_I serve my own purpose,_ thought the Andalusian, but the Master’s words rang to loudly in his mind.

_“Corrupted.”_

_“Neither icon nor flesh has a pure nature.”_

_“The tie between them may never be broken.”_

_“Not a human.”_

Even the Master could not separate man from demon now. How, then, was he too keep his hope in his restoration? The hope that their separate wills could one day be given back to their proper bodies seemed to crumble. In his haze he imagined that his dreams were nothing but old mummies, false immortals who crumbled as soon as they were dug up. The truth he had searched for for so long was dust.

_No. Truth is light._ He had fought so hard to control the murky alien presence that ran through his blood, all with an eye to one day being free of it. But that would never happen. He had to find a new strategy.

He banished the thought of how well his old strategy had worked. Now was no time for weakness. That was how the portrait’s will broke through.

Instead, he reminded himself: _Two wills. Two wills, and mine has always been the greater._ If he must abandon the dream of expunging the portrait from his body and soul, he would make it a part of himself, rather than the other way around. He would claim its power as his own, not something forced on him day after day. He might never be human; he might always be a monster; but he would always be the victor.

No matter what force of will it required, he would win. He would remain the victor, would keep the portrait his, every single second of every day and night, into eternity.


	5. Without Limits

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ignoring the Master's dismissal of any destiny for him, Dorian believes that Vanessa and himself are meant to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since the older-than-Amunet idea never gets referenced again in the show (much to my annoyance), I stripped the line "Amunet, girl? Much older!" from the séance scene.

**Dorian** sensed something in the air, something that made it sparkle like champagne, or perhaps it was the rising essence of the life one smelled in the fresh forest earth after a rain. Then he stepped in the doorway, facing another of Mr. Ferdinand Lyle’s absurdly bedecked rooms, and he saw her.

Something ran through him, a recognition of perfection, of simple rightness. It was as if he lived all his life surrounded by a cacophony of notes that were never on pitch, and suddenly his ears attuned to one single good note. It was as clear and shining as crystal. Dorian seldom found himself taken aback, but, tonight, this odd woman, if woman she were, had already given him the gift of surprise.

For a moment he stood transfixed, and then he stayed himself, calculating, as she assessed and dismissed the rest of the room. What did she sense of him? When would she turn around? He had little doubt that she would do so. She was even stranger than he, and her curiosity about one somewhat like herself would soon become unbearable.

She did turn, slowly, to take him in. With her gaze locked on him, she was even more mesmerizing. For all her aristocratically delicate features, for all the precious silks that she wore, her stare was that of a stalking predator, something of the jungle. She was studying him as a wild animal would study its prey, or its mate, or both.

He approached her without fear, for he loved the wildness he could feel from her, and wished she would run free. He wanted to see those hands freed from their dainty motions, wanted to see them tear apart London. He wondered how blood would look when it glistened on her neatly-trimmed fingernails, and what screams she would make when she released her animal lust.

Of course, that was hardly the sort of thing one said in greeting. One must not be vulgar when greeting a queen, _a queen of what, of night?_

“My name is Dorian Gray,” he said, offering himself up without explanation. He did not have to fake a charming smile for her.

“Vanessa Ives,” she said, a voice of natural sensuality and beauty starched stiff with propriety and, perhaps, suspicion.

“It’s a pleasure, Miss Ives. I… couldn’t help but notice your skepticism,” he told her.

That surprised her. He imagined that she spent most of her time being congratulated on her success as an adornment, not recognized for her perceptiveness.

“Am I skeptical?” she asked. He wasn’t quite sure if it was a test of his worthiness, or if she thought that line of conversation would be a more pleasant waste of time than the others open to her.

“About the room. Rather aggressive in the chinoiserie, and geographically capricious to say the least. In this one room, there’s Japanese, Siamese, Egyptian, Balinese, and something I take to be last season’s panto of Aladdin.”

Coming from an ordinary woman, her sound would have been a giggle. “Are you a friend of Mr. Lyle’s?”

“Never met him before tonight. It was more of a random invitation.”

“Do you get many of those?”

It was one of the consequences of being charming, constantly being invited to visit strangers who had vaguely heard of his decorative qualities, but he didn’t regret it. After all, there was always the chance that one of the partygoers would make it worth the trouble.

“Entirely.”

“You could say no,” she pointed out. Her eyes continued to appraise him.

“I never say no.”

She liked that response, and yielded her own confession. “I wasn’t skeptical of the room.” Yet, even as she offered that, her body stiffened. Perhaps sharing that mote of information made her feel vulnerable, or perhaps it hurt her to spell out her disappointment over his mistake in her. But she didn’t turn away. She hadn’t finished her evaluation.

“What, then?” he asked, to which she made no reply. Miss Ives must cherish her secrets. “Shall I guess?”

She hesitated. “Have on, Mr. Gray.”

He told her what truth he had gathered. “You do not belong here. Even less than I. Your eye is careful and appraising. This is not a careful room, although,” he acknowledged his own worldly interest with a circular glance, “there is much to appraise. That can only divert you for so long. You do not like it here. You are closed to it.” He reached for one of her bare hands; at first she pulled it away, but then she let him half-enfold it lifted it with his. “Yet… you are the only woman in this house not wearing gloves.” He caressed the bare white skin very gently with both of his own hands, and it seemed to both soothe and excite her. He thought that she drew more sensation from his touches than an average person, on an average night, could. “Your hands want to touch, but your head wants to appraise. Your heart is torn between the two.” Dorian had been moving closer and closer to her face, and now he breathed just past her ear. “You were skeptical because you had thought this was going to be a wasted evening, but now you’re not so sure.”

No, she was not sure. They shifted around one another, their faces not quite touching, but feeling one another’s presence in the charged air that flowed with their motions. It was not a kiss, but it was not a nothing, either.

Mr. Lyle interrupted it. “Ladies and gentlemen, please, give me your attention, please! Our guest of honor has arrived. May I present… the renowned Madam Kali! So come along, gather around the table, those of you without fear. We will need eight people of courage.”

Miss Ives looked only skeptical, but Dorian would not refuse such a dare, especially given his vague feeling that this clairvoyant might not be a complete fraud. Whatever her feelings about Madam Kali’s skills, Miss Ives chose not to break their handhold, and they wound up sitting side by side at a round table covered in flawless glass. Judging by the slight stiffening of her manners, she liked this room even less than the previous one.

Once the candles had been lit, Madam Kali began to speak. “Ladies, please remove your gloves. Gentlemen, please remove your jewelry.”

Any transcendentalist had to recognize the usual beginnings of a séance, but Dorian chose to play dumb, to find out what Vanessa knew. “What’s going on?”

“I believe,” she said dryly, “that we are about to commune with the spirits.”

“Please join hands,” Madam Kali intoned. She had a lovely voice for this line of work, whether or not her magic was real. It was low and rich and dark, and when she began to lull the group “back in time to the ancient sea, back in time when the spirits walked, back in tim when the sun was new and the old gods walked,” Dorian felt something akin to his makers’ magic in the room. No, she was not a fraud, although she was certainly not as alien as Miss Ives, either.

Miss Ives sensed something, too. At Kali’s call for “the mother goddess,” she twitched, her hand tightening on Dorian’s.

“I call for this in the name of the dead.” Kali was whispering now. “Come to me. Come to me.”

Suddenly, Kali screamed out and lowered her head. When she raised it, her voice had changed: deeper, harsher, guttural.

“What… summoned… me?” she asked. “I speak… for the dead. For… the undying.”

Her expression changed, and her voice was her own again. “How… There is another… here…”

Dorian looked to Miss Ives, who was clearly reacting strongly to Kali. He had been to séances before, had seen what he believed to be genuine mediums in action; he had not guessed that Miss Ives was anything so common, but either it was among her talents, or she truly was some sort of god herself.

“Amunet…” Kali continued, “Amunet…” Her words began to come out as a hiss, angry and needy: “Amunet, serpent, hidden one, know your master, your lover, your master!”

A paroxysm was overtaking Miss Ives. She writhed in her chair, rolling her head on her slender neck and spasming before slumping over as if in a swoon. She awakened—whatever she was—with a sensual and teasing growl, rubbing against the back of her chair, moaning in a foreign language, and taking in the rest of the occupants with half-closed eyes that sprang open to reveal a blinding intensity. To Dorian’s surprise, she did not direct it at Madam Kali, but at an elderly gentleman whom he thought he recognized from the papers as Sir Malcolm Murray.

“Father mine,” she called out, childish pleading layered atop knowing seduction, “take me with you! What a ripping time we’ll have! It’ll be an adventure. You’ll teach me. Let me come with you. I’ll prove myself a proper explorer! Peter loves you, Father.”

Her breath quickened and she clutched her hands, along with her partners’ to her chest. Though his hand lay well to the side of her heart, Dorian could feel its throbbing through the layers of heavy cloth.

“Father, if the porters die, how are we to survive?” she gasped. “I’m not frightened, I’m not. Such an adventure. It’s so green, so beautiful. But the porters are dying and I can’t go on, I’m sick. Is it the dysentery? But I’m bleeding. Oh, God, I’m bleeding. I’m shitting blood now. I have no more clean trousers. I’m sorry.” The hesitation that often precedes an important but inevitable decision, then: “I’ll stay at base camp. You go on. Will you name a mountain after me? Are you proud of me?”

Miss Ives lunged forward and slammed her hands against the table. The candles could almost have been extinguished from the ferocity of the motion, but the fire in the hearth went out as well, to the shrieks of several guests. Smoke filled the air from the extinguished flames.

Sir Malcolm was not among those screaming. He sat in place, lips trembling, tears standing in his eyes, not lowering his head at the spirit’s revelations.

It was, by far, the finest séance Dorian had ever attended.

The power pulled back into itself as suddenly as it had been unleashed, and “Peter” fell back against the chair. “Goodbye. We’ll see each other soon, Father. Father…”

“Cold,” “Peter” murmured, shifting as though trying to snuggle against a warmth he could not find. He began to sing himself to death, his voice—Miss Ives’s voice—growing weaker and raspier as he went, until it was nothing but a croaking whisper. “Can’t feel my hands. And there’s no more water. Can’t—swallow.

“You knew I was dying, didn’t you, Father? Did you name… a mountain… after me?”

_The Murray Mountains of the Congo,_ Dorian thought. He had always assumed that Sir Malcolm had named them after himself.

Miss Ives breathed out, as if exhaling the spirit, and her head lolled to one side, eyes open and glazed. Even the pulse that Dorian felt in the veins in her hand weakened and slowed, although he had little doubt that she would recover. He felt oddly awkward. What gesture of respect did one make, when a dead person died in a still-living body?

The whole room started when Miss jerked back to life. Again, she was the sensuous, predatory creature of before, making a strange, rattling growl; but this time she was stronger, more terrifying and more mesmerizing both, and a the even stranger rattle and hiss of a snake seemed to accompany her from another world, rather than emanating from any throat in the room. Dorian felt himself lean back, panting with shallow breaths, pinned in place by both fascination than fear, knowing that, for once, he shared the room with something more powerful than himself.

She luxuriated for a moment before she spoke, lifting her arms above her hair with its glorious fall of escaping hair, and writhing against the chair. Her back arched as if she were close to the ecstasy of orgasm, but denied it. _"Your master, your lover…"_

She leaned against the table, pressing Dorian’s hand to the glass. A spiderweb of cracks appeared across the whole surface, terrifying the other guests. “Father?” she called out, her voice taunting as she looked around. “Mina’s waiting!”

Sir Malcolm stood, but Miss Ives was unimpressed. “No!” she shouted, slamming her hands harder against the table, and he neither spoke nor left.

“I wonder,” she said, in a parody of a small girl’s voice, “when was the moment you knew that you wanted to fuck her? But why were you not more discreet? Vanessa saw you, you know. She heard you, went around the corner, and saw you, you know, fucking, fucking her cunt.” Miss Ives seemed to savor that knowledge. “Vanessa saw that.” She rose from her chair and kicked it far back, but she hardly needed it, since she was climbing on to the table now, moving with the sinuousness Dorian had heard ascribed to jaguars, and stalking Sir Malcolm Murray. She threw aside one of the extinguished candelabrum as if she imagined she were discarding all humanity. “You man, you animal, you man, you animal! Creature!” She stood high in the center of the table and looked up to the ceiling before beginning to bend backwards. For a moment, she resumed her foreign speech, before she changed into words the party understood, if not a manner they could accept. “I look into his eyes and they are red like blood from Peter’s ass. I look into his eyes and they are red like blood from her cunt when you fucked her. His teeth are sharp like your teeth when you bit her cunt, and it is wet like the jungle, like tears, and I am crying. I am so afraid, Father. Find me, find me, save me save me!” The echoes of her last four words far exceeded what her voice alone could explain; they were like a chorus of desperate souls shouting their terror from Hell.

That appeared to be all that more than most of partiers could withstand. Madam Kali began ululating, followed by some of the others, whom Dorian doubted would have known how without some foreign presence touching them. They stood or sat in paralyzed fear while she slithered from the table and swung open both doors with purpose.

Dorian took the time to make polite goodbyes to a his stunned fellows, some of whom were still shrieking. Such was his nature; he could not deny it.

Of course, he was more intrigued, at the moment, by Miss Ives’s nature. Perhaps, if he had left promptly, he would have been the first to meet her. As it was, by the time he tracked her on foot to a near-deserted alley, she had found a sailor and was kneeling on his lap. She moved the man more than the other way around, and clasped him with her hands so hard that Dorian expected him to bruise. Even from a distance, he could hear her snarls and grunts, and the louder sounds as she three times reached a climax. She seemed not to care about how exposed she was with her lover, and gave no sign of sensing Dorian. By the time she rose from the ground, she appeared somewhat shaken yet also more controlled, more herself.

_No. Not that. More… bottled,_ he thought. She had been herself when she left off her gloves to feel things others couldn’t, she had been herself when she growled and swayed her way across the table toward Sir Malcolm Murray, she had been herself when she fucked that stranger, she was herself now. She was one person, but what was she? _“Mother goddess,”_ echoed Kali’s words. Dorian had no idea what her nature was, except that it was irresistible.

While the sailor remained curled against the wall in a heap, Miss Ives climbed off him and walked gracefully away without a word. Dorian closed his eyes and felt the sweetness of the rain falling on her bare arms, the thunder like when the world began, the air charged and rushing, swirling toward her, battering her, but it did not matter, for she was meant to be the center of the storm.

When he opened his eyes, Miss Ives had disappeared. The rain had soaked his clothes and hair so that they stuck to his skin, and the storm was no more than a storm ever was.

**Father** Jacob was a devout Catholic, the sort, Dorian thought, who would have risked his life to serve the Eucharist in cellars during Cromwell’s reign. He was also the first priest in a long time to like Dorian better for apparently being pious. Dorian did not admire his belief, but he did enjoy it: All plays went better when the actors had faith in their lines. He showed his appreciation, as he would have tipped the ushers and clapped his hands at the theater, by anonymously paying for the church’s cemetery maintenance and tearing up every year on Maundy Thursday.

However, even an ordinary Mass called for subtler performances by its congregants, and Dorian made sure to give the priest an expression of childlike reverence when Jacob placed the host upon his tongue. He was a second away from tasting the “blessed” wine when he sensed her presence: Old, older than his own, yet fresh as a budding orchid, and far more sacred than anything in this church. She was near, although he thought he would have sensed her more strongly if she had actually entered the building; and the jaguar was hunting.

Dorian played his part without lapse until the ceremony was done. If she had tracked him this far, she would wait for the Mass to end. Sure enough, he felt her, perhaps five or six yards away, as he exited the church. He made no show of noticing her, but saw her, on the edge of her vision, dressed in cold, stiff blue and black, sitting as straight as any statue on a stone bench.

It was so very new, sensing someone this strongly. He had long known that he could feel glimpses of others’ emotions and sensations, but never had he been so attuned to one, except for his shadow in the portrait.

He walked to the greenery of the botanical gardens, where tiny spiders attached their webs unnoticed to tidy lilies and tendrils of wildness threatened to creep from pots made in modern factories. He could think of few more apt metaphors for Miss Ives’s presence, at least few that he could easily show her. He felt her presence, stalking him on silent soft paws, along the sidewalks and through the aisles of the sunlit greenhouse.

The botanical garden was in itself a fine diversion, for those who had learned to discipline themselves for pleasure. One thought of petals as smooth, but the true joy of touching them lay in the countless minuscule variations of texture, brushing against the ridges of her fingers as he stroked them, so that they were rough and smooth at once. With enough focus, the exquisite blossoms with their hidden anger and their complex perfumes and the moist atmosphere that caused drops to fall like nectar from the petals and leaves became a tiny rapture, a moment that summoned the soul from the wretched boredom of this world.

For a moment, she felt the ghost of his rapture, running through his spine; and his own delight echoed back to him.

“Mr. Gray?” she asked, in a half-whisper, as though he were a secret she wished to keep to herself.

“Miss Ives,” he said. “What an unexpected pleasure. Do you have an interest in botany?”

“All I really seem to know about plants is how to kill them,” she answered, almost stammering. He didn’t quite believe that, but she was indeed nervous here, amid all this nature; nervous because she could imagine herself running wild amid the tangled leaves and fresh black loam.

“Then let me show you something extraordinary,” he said, inspired by the remembrance of a new arrival to the garden. He doubted even Miss Ives had seen a Rothschild’s Slipper orchid—although, who knew? Perhaps she had seen the very beginnings of the world, and only forgotten some of her knowledge. “I try to see one extraordinary thing each day.” That goal had begun to seem impossible as he approached two millennia of existence, but, given the strange convergence of mysterious powers on London in the past decade, he took heart in the idea that it would one day be possible.

“What I find so fascinating about plants is their duplicity,” he told her, sauntering through the garden, surrounded by the greenery.

“Duplicity?” she asked, as if startled by the concept. _“We all play parts,”_ he recalled telling Mr. Chandler.

“Well, their hidden depths, at any rate. Here, look at this,” he said, rounding a corner. A flower sat on the table, its purple blooms tender and inviting.

“Hm, beautiful,” said Miss Ives. He imagined that she provided the stiffness for her corset, rather than the other way around.

“You can do better,” he told her. “Give me words.”

She leaned close to it. “Subtle fragrance, like a berry. But not a woodland thing, no, not a thing of the forest. Something… _of the jungle.”_ He imagined that deadly nightshade felt like quite a kindred spirit to Miss Ives.

“What does it say to you?”

“Touch me… with your finger… softly… my scent upon your neck… _Taste,”_ she said, quivering slightly as she gave in to the voice of the bond between them.

He waited a moment, savoring her revelry. “Atropa belladonna. Deadly nightshade.”

“No,” she protested, but he knew that she had felt the danger, had felt it faintly in the plant the way she felt it strongly in him. It was his blood, as much as the finger that stroked a flower’s petals was his flesh, and she longed to commune with both.

He teased her a little. “Afraid so. The berries are quite lethal. The whole thing, in fact.”

“You’re a font of useful information,” she said, her voice starched stiff again.

“God! No one’s ever accused me of being useful before.” _Not in this lifetime, anyway._ They continued to walk. “It’s the adder beneath the rose, isn’t it? All of this. It can seem so enticing and luxurious, yet within, there’s a dark thing, waiting.”

“Things are so rarely what they seem,” she said, dark experience tinging her proper voice.

“Which of us does not have our secrets, Miss Ives?” he asked. He dropped behind until she turned and stared him straight in the face, her gaze coming close to murderous.

“Ah! Here’s the thing I wanted to show you,” Dorian exclaimed, giving no indication in his manner that their conversation had been anything but light and casual and normal until that point. He brushed against her, and she did not rebuff him. “Rothschild’s slipper,” he said, exhibiting the pretty flowering plant at a remove from the crowd. “The rarest orchid in the world, and thus the most expensive. It’s only found on a particular mountain in Borneo. It can take up to fifteen years to bloom. All that time, perfecting itself. A lifetime for six perfect flowers.”

He wondered if she understood the lifetimes he had spent becoming the being who could appreciate this perfect connection to another person, another creature like himself. Damn destiny and damn the Master’s words. Whatever forces did or did not mean this to be, it was right. Dorian felt it every time he felt another heart beat, dance, soar with his own.

“How long will it bloom?” she asked.

“A moment.”

“Is it poisonous?” Miss Ives asked, because she was Miss Ives.

If he had sincerely worshipped any god, Dorian might have asked that deity if it had designed his eyes, out of all the eyes in the world, for their lovelorn expressions. He turned them to his Beatrice. “Like all beautiful things, I hope so.”

This moment of beauty would not last forever, although Dorian imagined that the greater moment, the love between them, would, once she acknowledged it. He shifted away from her. “This has been an unexpected pleasure for me, Miss Ives, but… I’m afraid I have another engagement. You will excuse me?”

“Yes, of course,” she assented, as disappointed as he had expected.

“I’m off for the theater tonight,” he said. Let her follow his trail; he loved her for her claws, sheathing and unsheathing, and her teeth and her fierce predator’s eyes. “More beautiful illusion. Do enjoy the flowers.”

He did not need to look back to sense her almost sickening wish for his return.

**“I’ll** serve,” Dorian said, when the waiter arrived at their table with an uncut game hen on a platter. “I’m jealous of your company.” Though he gave Miss Ives an arch expression to go with the sentiment, it was true. He wanted them to be the only two people in their own little world at that moment.

“I fell under the sway of the Fabians for a period,” he recalled as he carved the hen. “Only vegetables. It was hell.”

“And their philosophy?” asked Miss Ives.

He didn’t try to paint a better picture of himself than he merited. If he meant to take advantage of another immortal’s presence, he had to let her see his true colors. “It was… diverting. But then, I’ve been through so many: Transcendentalism, utilitarianism, aestheticism, Taoism, Ludditism, socialism. That didn’t stick,” he added, the quirk of his lips acknowledging his own preference for life as a member of the elite.

Ludditism was an old philosophy; it had few, if any, real practitioners living now; but Miss Ives’s face was not incredulous, merely intrigued, by his many philosophies and their ages. “Seeking what? Happiness?”

“They… all made me equally happy.”

“Meaning they all made you equally unhappy.” Miss Ives seemed to realize that he was laying all his cards on the table for her perusal. He acknowledged her point with a smile and the hint of a laugh.

“And religion?” she asked. It mattered to her, and he wondered why, wondered if she herself lay at the heart of some “mystery” that the priests claimed humankind could never understand.

“You mean God.”

“For the sake of argument, let’s say I do.”

He didn’t miss the faint combativeness in her choice of words. _“For the sake of argument.”_ Nor did he fail to notice her dismissal of Taoism as a religion. Was the topic of the Christian god a matter for conflict in her mind? At any rate, he had chosen honesty, and he intended to brazen through the subject of religion just as he had that of philosophy.

“I like the ritual of church, I suppose.” He knew that he sounded shallow again, but he could offer her nothing deeper than honesty. “Especially Catholicism. And you?”

She bought herself a little time with vagueness. “I… have a complicated history with the Almighty.”

_So you do believe in one god. And what did you do with him?_

“I believe, Mr. Gray,” she said, almost whispering, “that there are… tremors around us, like the vibrations of a note of music. Some might be more attuned to them than others. What do those do, those who have been chosen?”

“They endure uniqueness.” He had had two millennia to find a better answer, and not yet managed it. There was pleasure in that endurance, though, and the warmth of his voice told her of it.

“To be alien, to be disenfranchised from those around you, is that not a dreadful curse?”

_Have you not learned to delight in your power? Why are you still struggling?_ “To be different, to be powerful, is that not a divine gift?”

“To be alone.” She was all but begging for the answers she wanted to give herself, now, and he supplied them.

“To be seeking.”

“What?”

“Another.”

“Like you.”

“Who shares your rarity.”

“Then you are no longer unique,” she said, seeming amused by this trap.

“Nor are you alone.”

She smiled at him warily, yet with hope. He recalled his earlier words to her: _“You do not belong here, even less than I,”_ he remembered saying. She still did not belong in the ordinary world; she never would. For how long had she been isolated, trapped, alone? He could feel something of her pain, and wondered if it was greater than his own. She seemed barely able to accept the idea that someone else could truly touch her.

Yet she craved touch, connection, even if to a strange man with a monstrously beautiful aura. Otherwise, she would not have agreed—suggested, even—a return to Dorian’s lonely mansion. He put on a cylinder of Delibes’s “Dôme épais, le jasmin,” with its rising pitches haunted by freedom and its lyrics crying out for the two lovers’ joining. He thought of the sweet scents in the greenhouse, the perfumes that cast a frail shadow of different pieces of one’s soul, the deadly nightshade that had called so potently to Miss Ives, the way she looked about the room with the curiosity of a bold little girl and the awareness of a world adventurer.

“Do they not unnerve you, always looking at you?” she asked, holding a candelabrum near the wall. The smoke would damage these portraits of ordinary material, with time, but he liked to think that something of their essential brilliance would last.

“I liked to be looked at,” he told her. It was another truth, and part of why he had played her game of chase, her gaze keen and dangerous as she followed him through London.

“Not I,” she revealed.

“Yet you wear that dress.”

“That was for your eyes.”

That question opened her to several questions—why his looks did not count, why she even owned such dresses to begin with—, but she was leading this dance, and he didn’t use the opportunity to take over.

“All portraits,” she breathed, staring at his collection.

“I’m sorry?” he asked, hoping to get more.

“They are all portraits.” She sounded a little giddy at having a minor mystery that she could not solve on her own. “You have no landscapes or still lives.”

“Are people not the most mysterious things?”

She scoffed. “Sometimes I wish they were more so. The glance that gives away the game, the slight shift in body posture…”

“And what do I give away?” he asked, lightly, but with real curiosity regarding what she saw when she looked upon him.

She abandoned the portraits, approached him with the candelabrum, and inspected him slowly by the forgiving candlelight. “Nothing.” That conclusion seemed to delight her.

“What music would you like to listen to?” he asked her, having no good response to her fascination with him as a _nothing._

“Meaning who do I want to be at this moment,” she interpreted. “Who do you want to be, Dorian Gray?”

“Myself, without limits,” he said. After all, he had long given up on trying to be human. Had lost the desire for it, even.

“Then put on music for dancing,” she said.

_All music is for dancing. All that changes is the type of dance it inspires._ Perhaps wistfully, he chose “Au fond du temple saint.”

_“Her veil parts slightly. What a vision! What a dream.”_

The feelings of the fictional admirers had no great outward effect on her. “You have exceptional composure,” he told her. “Poise, I mean.”

“Control,” she said. It was the word he had meant, but she had to be the one to say it.

“Yes.” He watched her, clearly wanting to swirl in the dream of the song, of the candlelight and his presence, but unwilling to do so. “What would happen if you were to abandon it?”

“I couldn’t.”

“What would happen if you did?” he asked.

“There are things within us all that can never be unleashed.”

“What if they were?” They were very close now. She wore no perfume that would draw attention to her, but he could smell the precious fragrance of humanity alongside the ineffable magic that he felt with his monster’s senses.

“They would consume us. We we would cease to be, and another would exist in our place, without control. Without limits.”

He leaned even closer to her. “May I kiss your neck?” He always asked permission, had ever since that horrible, strange coupling on the fanged priests’ altar.

“Do not ask permission,” she commanded, although she tilted her head to receive the caress. The order had as much steel as any general’s behind it. “If you want to do a thing, do it because it is your desire, not my allowance. You must risk rejection.”

He wondered why Miss Ives, who had straddled and fucked a stranger in an alley not two weeks before, was unwilling to say what she wanted, why such a commanding person would force herself to passively wait on a man’s desires. No matter; if she had not wanted this, she would neither have come here nor told him to take the risk. And he could feel the desire in her, twining its way up her body as her face flushed and her eyelids closed, narrowing her sensations to that of his body against hers.

He kissed her neck, slowly but confidently, knowing the way the corset snugged to and controlled her body, the way it pressed her breasts back against the bone while she was free below, free and plumping and feeling her heart beat in her groin. He felt an echo of the growing, needy emptiness inside her channel, her instinctive tightening of pelvic muscles in a vain attempt to close it. He licked her neck, and it brought him a faint memory of doing this before, in her body, to someone else while rain tried to drive through her skin and she belonged in the storm, but this was better, _God_ this was better, his tongue sent lightning running through her veins, and he tasted salt and sweetness and womanhood and humanity, and beyond that he could feel her otherness, her strangeness, her divinity or blasphemy, like the charged air of the storm.

She turned to him, reciprocating, and the moan and growl of her voice held not only thunder’s purr but also lightning’s crackle. Very gently, he lifted her skirts, making hardly a rustle, while her tongue traced its way to the edge of her ear.

Dorian was nothing if not experienced, and her own sensations cast a reflection in his mind, clearer than anything he had felt from his other lovers. _“Touch me with your finger, softly, my scent upon your neck,”_ came her voice, as he very lightly brushed her most sensitive organ with his finger, letting her feel all the ridges that would never callus or be ground away by time, and she breathed deeply of the trail her own tongue had made. But she wasn’t quite ready to forsake her self-control, although they both knew she wanted to, even intended to, before the night was over. Her fingertips barely skated across his the silks he wore, and then, still breathing heavily, opening her eyes with determination, she reached for the hand beneath her dress and clutched it with both of hers before she let go with one.

She led him to and up the stairs, not asking for his guidance. With minute tugs and nudges through their joined hands he indicated the proper directions.

His bedroom was as tasteful as the rest of the house. It looked its best by candlelight, he thought, so he unhurriedly lit the candelabra and turned down the gaslights. Though Miss Ives remained fully dressed, the hunger in her eyes as she watched him was a nakedness of its own.

He walked back to her once he had extinguished the lamps, unbuttoning and carelessly discarding his waistcoat as he approached. He knew the thin shirt with its baggy cuffs made him look accessible, ready, ripe for the harvest, and she seemed to agree, her eyes softly caressing his face and shooting sparks at the points made by his nipples.

He moved behind her and opened her dress, a stiff, almost unadjustable thing that was probably more uncomfortable than her corset, and was certainly more inconvenient. She let him slide it off her arms, to settle around and in front of her. The bodice retained a human shape, so that it resembled a human supplicant kneeling before her, the skirts wrapping around her legs like arms as their enemy made his pleas.

Her shift, corset, corset cover, and petticoat all shared the gown’s theme: Mostly black, with touches of white. He undid the corset cover’s little nacre buttons next, their iridescence a sign of their expense, and it fell away, one more curtain fallen away from the Holy of Holies that was Vanessa Ives.

He undid her petticoat next. It laced in back; at least that garment accommodated her without stringent limits. The soft cotton slid onto the heap of stiffer outer skirts.

She turned to face him, and he saw in her eyes that he had unlocked her willingness to lose control. Her gaze burned and kissed him at once. She grabbed handfuls of his shirt and the buttons tore loose for her animal grasp, just as his other shirt’s buttons and snapped away for Mr. Chandler. The shirt dangled from his wrists, but he made no effort to finish what she had started.

She shoved him back with a growl. If anyone could stumble gracefully, it was Dorian, who smiled at her, all encouragement and invitation, and she fed on it. Vanessa stepped out of the bundle of skirts around her legs and stalked him, slowly, to where he stood by the bed.

It didn’t take her long to rip apart the cuffs of his sleeves and to yank down his trousers. He let himself fall against the bed and, smiling again, began to undo his shoes. She watched him remove his own shoes and stockings as she assumed a proud position on her knees on the bed, her thighs slender but strong. He wondered how often she danced.

Her patience lasted only in fits and starts; now she reached for him again, pushing his trousers and underwear farther down his legs so that he could let them fall to the floor. He tasted of her shoulders, the delicate skin of her chest above her corset. How much control did she want, and over whom, him or her? How much of her armor was she ready to shed?

Dorian lay prone on the bed. One might have described Miss Ives’s motions toward him as crawling, but it was a scorpion’s crawl. He reached for her neck, pulling her to him for a kiss; she returned the kiss, then seized his face, pushing him into the pillow. With a panther’s growl, she reached down to guide him inside of her.

That by itself would never be enough of a connection with Miss Ives. He slid a hand beneath the free pillow and withdrew a small, sharp knife. He cut through the expensive corset, which seemed to growl as well as the knife tore through it. It fell away, ruined, leaving her breasts and breathing free beneath her chemise. He didn’t push her for more than that, instead offering her the knife, although he wore nothing to cut away.

She smiled—grinned—with delight, running the edge of the knife down his chest, and tasting the scarlet stripe that he knew appeared in its wake. She liked the taste; she was eager for more blood; and she held her knife to his throat then, as if to claim all the blood that he had, but did not press it down. He panted beneath it, knowing that he was one too-heavy breath away from seeing her hair soaked crimson, and wishing she were ready for all the wonders that their natures allowed them.

He rolled over, and for a moment she allowed it. She wrapped her legs around him, kicked and snarled, her wanton and uncivilized grunts coming faster and faster. Her nails struck his back, and again he imagined them glistening red, the shine of candles on a coating of blood, while she pushed farther and drove her teeth into the muscles of his shoulder.

She twirled so that she looked down at him again, and he took in the sight of her shaking hair, half-unstyled now and wild as stray vines, the sweat just starting to run along her breastbone, and uncontrolled expression, her eyes beginning to glaze over and her teeth bared. Suddenly her back snapped back and her face tilted upward, but instead of the rhythmic thrashing he had expected, her body went still, undulating only with his own motions. A foreign breeze rushed through the room. The candle flames lay on their sides for a moment, and he thought he felt some presence, ghost or demon or kin to his creator, speaking, although he could not understand what it said.

The moment interrupted, Miss Ives broke free of him and leapt off the bed. Now she looked like the hunted more than the hunter. She barely paused to bundle her dress haphazardly around herself before fleeing the room. He wondered how she would fasten it, then recalled the unusual flexibility she had shown during the séance.

There were a million ways he would later imagine himself salvaging their love, ways that he could have caught the falling glass before it shattered. Perhaps it was already too late. He would never know, for, when it came to Vanessa Ives, Dorian Gray, immortal, ancient, a lover of thousands, found himself as hapless as a schoolboy eyeing his pretty neighbor for the first time. He sat up on the bed and watched, awestruck as when they had first met, while she left his room and his house and his life. She left, and he had not a word to say to stop her.

**She** did not send a note to him, not that day, nor the day after, nor the day after. A week passed, and he made his way to the home where she lived with Sir Malcolm Murray. He could sense her presence, fighting and in anguish. He strained to hear the vibrations of that note of music, but, if any of her thoughts were of him, he could not feel it. Sir Malcolm was there, and a young doctor named Victor Frankenstein, and Mr. Chandler, from whom radiated waves of fear and devotion; Dorian wondered why Mr. Chandler concerned himself so much more deeply with Miss Ives’s wellbeing than with Miss Brona Croft’s. Somewhere, he imagined, Miss Croft lay in a grave on unconsecrated ground, or continued to hack up blood onto her deathbed’s pillows, yet all Mr. Chandler’s attention seemed bound to Miss Ives and this house.

None of it was his concern, certainly not in the opinion of the other residents of the house. They would tell him nothing, save that Miss Ives was too ill for company, and that they had no idea when she would be better. Even if he had not had his uncanny gifts, their drawn faces and slightly shaking hands would have given credence to the claim. The situation felt so dire that he could not even draw much amusement from the strange ironies inherent in his relationships with the various people involved.

Yet he maintained faith in Miss Ives. Whatever she struggled with, whatever haunted her, she was stronger. He had to believe that. She was struggling, but she would win, and then she would choose the life that they had so briefly tasted, without limits. When he returned, she would have won her struggle, and they would be together as they—not some self-appointed master or demon or judging god on a throne— wished to be.

He stayed gone for three more weeks, traveling, seeking knowledge that might be useful to them in their new life together. A trail of breadcrumbs lead him to Italy, where he paid an exorbitant price for a set of manuscripts written in the same odd jumble of languages he had encountered during his life as the Andalusian in Cairo. They confirmed his belief that she was indeed a powerful being, an immortal, like himself but older, stronger, and darker, black to his gray. She was pursued by a god, whom she did not accept. Small wonder, if it was the same god who had made him. Of course, if she was a goddess, struggling against a god, then she knew that already, and he had nothing to offer her but the connection between them.

When a month had passed without word from Miss Ives, he returned to Sir Malcolm’s house. People called it Grandage Place, probably to distinguish it from the Murrays’ country estate on the coast. Its name was a small detail, but he savored it as he had savored the salty-sweet aroma of Miss Ives’s neck and the way she held her head in a crowd. He wondered where they would make their home next, out of the thousands of choices before them, and if they would spend a decade or a century there. Perhaps they would not need an earthly home; perhaps, if he properly understood the manuscripts, she would conquer Heaven or Hell with him at her side.

Sir Malcolm had a butler, an African named Sembene with deliberately scarred cheeks, a dignified gait, and wise old eyes. He announced to Vanessa that “a gentleman” had arrived to see her.

“Send Mr. Gray in,” she commanded with certainty.

Dorian was led to a study of sorts. Miss Ives sat at a small table, a deck of Tarot cards before her. She was very pale, dressed in a Chinese coat rather than street wear, and her hair fell unpinned around her shoulders, but her expression was one of strong and steely control.

“Miss Ives,” he said. There was no manual of etiquette for visiting a goddess who had just fought off a god’s advances.

“Mr. Gray,” she said, her expression denying the familiarity between them. “Won’t you sit?”

He sat in the chair across from her, then bit his lip as he tried to think of what to say. “I’m so glad to see you’ve recovered.” Silence. “I stopped by, but they said you were ill.”

Her face softened, very briefly, before hardening again. She must not have expected that he would care. She seemed not to want him to. “I’m quite myself,” she stated, as though becoming someone else were the problem. Perhaps the control of someone else was.

“Yes, of course,” he agreed. Who else would she be? Miss Ives, Amunet, whatever she was, might outlast the sun and moon, and she would never cease to be who she was.

Except that she was now pretending to be someone who cared nothing for him or what he had shown her of herself. _“She doesn’t want to be anyone else,”_ Dorian had told Mr. Chandler. _Why now, why now does she want to be someone else?_

“I went traveling, since I couldn’t see you,” he continued. Silence again. “Yes, um, Italy at first. I bought some manuscripts.” He tried a self-deprecating laugh at the idea of the extravagance, but she wasn’t charmed.

“Welcome back,” she said. Her tone held no warmth.

He glanced at the deck of cards. “Won’t you read my future?”

“I don’t know that you have one.”

“Everyone has a future.” _Just because I am not destined to live, does not mean I shall not._

“Not everyone. Some people only have a past.”

“Then read my past,” he said. Some distant, self-protective part of himself felt a crawling nakedness at the thought, but he wanted to share eternity with Miss Ives, and that included the past. This was not like the hateful portrait invading his mind and body. This was _chosen._ This was Miss Ives.

“Then you would have no more mystery,” she said. The finality of her tone made clear that she considered him good for nothing else.

“Let me take you to lunch, at least.”

“I’m engaged today.”

“Then dinner, better yet. There’s a new restaurant—“

“I’m sorry, it’s impossible.”

“I would like to talk to you—“

“If you’ll excuse me,” Miss Ives said. She rose and turned to leave.

“Miss Ives!” Dorian cried. He stood as well and stepped so that he was not quite blocking her exit. “At four o’ clock today, I will be waiting at Rothschild’s Slipper. Please.”

“Good morning, Mr. Gray. Sembene can show you out.” She walked away, discarding him like a torn card from her Tarot.

**The** orchid no longer attracted its own crowd, although people still milled about the gardens. They had no interest in seeing the blooms in their old age, wrinkled and brown and ugly. Dorian wondered if it reminded the humans of London too much of themselves. It had been so long since he had thought of things as they had.

He sensed Miss Ives before he heard her heels clicking, quick but not unseemly, on the pavement. “Mr. Gray,” she said.

Why did they keep up the strange charade that they needed words to sense one another’s presence? “Thank you for coming, Miss Ives, or— may I call you Vanessa?”

“Of course.”

She turned her attention to one of the grotesquely aged blossoms. “The bloom is fading.”

“Another fifteen years, and it’ll bloom again.”

“A lifetime,” she marveled.

“An instant.” He wondered why Miss Ives, so powerful, would see time as she did. “Will you walk with me?”

They, too, turned away from the ugly flower. They could do nothing for it.

“Do you feel I owe you an explanation?” Vanessa asked, brooding. She was unhappy with the need she felt to distance herself from him, she resented it, and she resented him.

“For what?”

“My flight from your house.”

He shook his head. “You owe me nothing but your company this afternoon.”

The look that she gave him was as sharp as vinegar and as bitter as wormwood, but beneath it lay tiredness and grief. “That’s you, isn’t it? The pleasant neutrality that risks nothing.”

“Then allow me to risk everything.” He clutched her hand. He did not know how to explain his value, his secret, his demons, only that he must do it now, or lose her.

“Mr. Gray,” she said, and if he had thought before that her manners were starched, now he heard and saw Damascus steel. “I am not the woman you think I am, and with you, I am not the woman you want to be. It’s too dangerous.”

“I have no fear,” Dorian reassured her. He had seen the hidden side of Miss Ives and loved it.

“But I must. Between us, there’s a rare connection, I won’t deny it. But that very intimacy released something… unhealthy in me. I cannot allow it.”

“You will not be able to deny it,” he said, leaning closer. Certainly, he could not deny it.

“I’m sorry, I will,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut. Only when she opened them and he saw her pain did he realize that he had lost. She knew what this would cost them, she felt it already as much as he did, and she was choosing to throw it away regardless. There was nothing he could say to persuade her.

“Poor Dorian,” she murmured, as if speaking to a small child. “You’ve never known this feeling before, have you?”

“I don’t know what I’m feeling.” There was something else besides the grief that he recognized, something that stunned him in its newness. Vanessa Ives seemed to bring out all his rarest emotions, but he had not thought that any unprecedented ones were left for him to experience.

“It’s rejection,” she explained. She kissed him, in a restrained and almost chaste way, before pulling back. “Goodbye, Mr. Gray.”

It would have been pointless to watch her march into the distance. He could offer her nothing that she would consider worth her return. And, after all the centuries of seeking new experiences, the only new emotion he had found was one he would gladly have sacrificed to keep their love affair alive. When had another person been worth more than a new feeling?

He reached up and felt the tears on his face. In another world, he and Vanessa would have kissed away any tears until the world no longer brought them forth. That was not the world that was. He was crying, not with the fury of the gods, not even with the exquisite beauty of a theatrical hero, but like any mortal around him would have cried when sad. Another few centuries, another cause for tears; another few centuries, and he would still find himself weeping alone.


	6. The Lamp

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dorian connects with the dying and tries to save a life during Alaric's first siege of Rome.

Rome  
408 A.D.

**No** one else would have returned to Rome from Ravenna for the reasons that the supposed freedman’s descendant known as Septimius had. Nouveau-riche, wearing rings on every finger, defying sumptuary laws with his richly-colored silks, looking halfway between an emperor and a uniquely successful catamite in a Corinthian brothel: That was who Septimius had chosen to be. He painted his eyelids like an Egyptian of old, and carried no weapons; at the moment, even the jewelry that he wore concealed no poison. No one imagined him a threat, or even a survivor. Certainly, no one would have imagined him wishing to face down Alaric’s army.

But returned he had, all on account of the threat of the Goths. Everywhere in the empire, there were two reactions to the Goths’ march: Disbelief, intrigue—he wondered how many former slaves were walking behind Alaric—, and despair. For some, the despair reached a sort of ecstasy. There were cults that imagined it was the end of the world, who saw some exemption to the Christian distaste for suicide, and planned mass celebrations of death. He had been in a dozen over the past fifteen years, and heard he’d missed out on one while collecting intelligence in the capitol.

The last time had been a delight, imagined and executed with exquisite detail. He recalled the sumptuous silks on couches of imported wood, the dice thrown amid laughter to determine who should slit who’s throat, the blood flung across murals of the latest designs and filling the gaps between pebbles in the floor mosaics. It had enriched the host’s sheet of Tyrian purple, giving it an incomparable wet sheen, and soaked the cushions on which the guests had reclined.

This cult was far poorer, made up of plebeians and ascetics; the members eyed him suspiciously, and some made shouts about his excess and depravity when he petitioned for membership. He supposed that a grand gesture would be required of him, or, at least, what they considered a grand gesture.

“My friends, is it not too late for me to seek salvation? What would your lord say?” he asked.

“‘Sell all you have, and give it to the poor,’” quoted one gruff man, dressed in sackcloth. Gaius, Septimius thought his name was, from his scouting beforehand. Of course, there were five other Gaiuses in this particular cult of less than fifty members.

“I shall gladly do that,” Septimius acquiesced. “No, I shall throw aside my jewels now, and let your wise leader dispose of them as he chooses!” He tore the jewels from his fingers, tossed the tunic overhead; it all landed in a heap before a shriveled, stinking man with long, yellowed fingernails. Septimius stood now in nothing but a linen loincloth, albeit one of much finer stuff than what the leader, Lucius, wore. Septimius's had heard before of camel-hair shirts, but rare was the maniac who went so far as to wear a camel-hair subligacula. He wondered if it might have a linen lining, but decided that, no, Lucius really was that kind of fool.

Thankfully, he was also the sort of fool who would believe such a dramatic profession of admiration. “Welcome, friend,” said Lucius. His lips were cracked, his words even more so, and Septimius wondered if the man limited his water as well as his food. “But,” continued Lucius, “you are young, and might lead some into sinful thoughts. You must endure the temptations of comfort.” He turned to one of the congregants. “Fetch him a sack, Quintus.”

Septimius had worn sackcloth before, while living with a group of self-deluded “mystics” in the African desert; he had not intended to do so again, but he was willing to. He took the sack that Quintus offered and put his arms and head through the holes, inwardly laughing at the ridiculousness.

Having committed to this madness, Septimius intended to go as far as he could with it. “I see that some of your people wear ashes as well,” he noted. “Shall I do so?”

“Indeed!” Lucius said, “Indeed!” His black beard, streaked with gray, fell to his navel, and his massive eyebrows wiggled when he spoke. Dorian supposed the man deserved some compensation for his balding scalp.

There was a tallow lamp set deep in the room. Septimius moved toward it and collected some of the foul soot on his fingers, then spread it across his face. The group cooed in acceptance.

“I mourn for the end of all we love in this world,” he declared, “but I am grateful to God for removing its temptations. Once I sinned, and sinned often and deeply, but now I know that there will be no more occasions for sin, for we shall offer ourselves to God before the barbarians can defile our city, our women, and our churches.”

“Indeed!” cried Lucius again. Septimius wondered if anyone had actually had the poor judgment to ordain Lucius a cleric, or if he had taken on the role by himself. “All our monuments to vanity shall crumble into the muck of the streets. It remains to be seen, do we have the courage to face our judgment first? Do we?”

“Yes!” cried the chorus of under-nourished people. Septimius didn’t ask how his gold would benefit the poor, if everyone were going to die anyway. He doubted that many in this crowd had studied rhetoric, or could have succeeded had they tried. He further wondered how many of these people were starved by choice, and how many by Alaric’s siege.

“Tomorrow we prove ourselves to God!” cried Lucius. His lips remained dry, but his eyes glistened. “Tomorrow we show our loyalty to him, our willingness to die before we join the horde of disbelievers!”

Of course, most of the Goths had converted, in form at least, years ago. Certainly Alaric had. But that was another fact that it would not profit Septimius to mention.

“Yes!” the people shouted, Septimius with them. “To God the merciful, to God the merciful, to God the merciful, to God the merciful…”

By Septimius’s count, the chanting lasted for at least five hours, during which Lucius lost his voice and made sick-frog sounds while mouthing the words. Perhaps having decided that the tallow lamp was too much of an indulgence, they continued in the dark once the sun had set. Some of the children dozed off, but their parents wakened them with sharp reminders of the glories that awaited those who denied earthly temptations. One girl, not more than six or seven, sniffled quietly after being slapped across the face.

Morning came, the sun pouring through the windows on a room that looked all the worse for its illumination. Still, the reward wasn’t far away, and he wouldn't leave before he obtained it.

At evening, Lucius said Mass, his face gleaming with sweat as he called for God’s blessing on the bread and the wine. Septimius remembered a time when such rituals had been cause for suspicion of cannibalism, and remembered being disappointed when they had turned out to be untrue; now, he thought, he was a cannibal, consuming the excitement of these idiots’ deaths to keep his heart alive. The bread was in tiny bits, the size of his littlest fingernail, as one would expect during a time of diminished rations, and the wine barely enough to taste, not even enough to fully wet the mouth.

It didn’t matter, for as soon as Mass was complete, the people broke their fast and turned to an humble clay pot with an humble clay dipper. Rome still had good water, the barbarians not having destroyed the aqueducts—perhaps, thought Septimius,that meant their leaders were planning to live here, although the Goths as a whole would be much more comfortable with grants of farmland—, but this water wouldn’t be good for long, as Lucius poured an unnecessarily large jar of white arsenic into it.

Lucius certainly wasn’t skimping on the poison. Assuming the druggist hadn’t cheated him, none of these people, except for Septimius himself, would survive half a dipper from that pot. He wondered how they had paid for such a quantity. Had any of these people been wealthy before they chose to die?

He wrinkled his nose slightly at the idea of arsenic. Given his preferences, he would have surrounded himself with people who chose a prettier form of death, nightshade with its almost-otherworldly ravings or the gaudy gore of slit throats. People dying of arsenic moaned and cramped and stank of shit, all of which made it even more popular among assassins. These people, he assumed, had no intention of passing off their deaths as food poisoning. They simply saw the hours of agony before them as unimportant, compared to the glories of Heaven and the ravages of the Goths. At least none of them would live to have bad memories of the event.

He watched the priest go first, watched the people proceed in a fashion he thought might be based on their order of entrance into the cult follow. Some of the older children knew it was poison; one tried to run. The younger were simply thirsty, having been forced to fast along with their fellows. That had seemed pointlessly cruel, given that they hadn’t even taken Communion, but he had chosen this company, and there wasn’t time to change their ways.

Septimius went last. He didn’t hesitate, knowing nothing would happen to him, but slid his eyes about the room. Lucius, determined as ever to ignore this world’s vicissitudes, was dripping in even more sweat and doubled over; one of the children was already retching. The whole scene felt sorry and sordid and would no doubt soon become even smellier, and he wished that he could bring himself to leave it. To walk away and leave these agonies behind, to not cling to such misery. But he could not. Was he too weak or too strong? He didn’t know.

He knew that he was fascinated, and repulsed, and fraudulent. He knew that, for these hours, he felt a part of something grand. Wasn’t choosing death for one’s high-minded lunacy a grand thing? Wasn’t it beautiful? The poets wrote so much of it, although they tended to leave out the vomit and the crying children. And the worst of it was that he felt that the poets were right, even as he knew that in some ways they were wrong. He felt joined to these people by his pretense to die with them, joined by the shared bread and wine and poisoned water, as if there really were some communion in it. The feeling came and went over the course of the day. At times, he would look at them and feel as though he were trapped in some demented joke, some parody of heroism. At others, he looked around them and felt tenderness and camaraderie, and the taste of that closeness filled his mouth like some insidiously sweet-tasting poison, or worse, a medicine that only delayed a slow and painful death.

**When** all of them were dead, he staggered out of the room where they had gathered. He wondered if everyone around them had truly not suspected, or if the cultists’ neighbors were simply grateful to know that their grain rations would last that much longer. He left behind his jewels and his silks. Let the dead have their offering; he had taken its value in return.

He took his time as he crossed the city. In the Janiculum he passed the Molinae, continuing to grind their grain with the power of the aqua Traiana. Unless the siege ended soon, there would be nothing left for them to grind. _That is not my concern,_ he reminded himself, _and the world might be no better if I made it such._ However superior the Romans felt, the Eastern side had unquestionably betrayed Fridiger; Honorius may not have been responsible for Valens’s choices, but Septimius had little doubt he would make similar ones, given the chance. Of course, even if that were untrue, Alaric might still take of Honorius’s head once he reached Ravenna. While Septimius mused on his options, a too-thin ferryman took him across the Tiber and up a canal to the Caelian Hill, where Junia still lived.

He had one final objective unfulfilled in Rome. It wasn’t really a mission, he supposed. Surely, his attempts to move Junia Saturnina Tertia from the city before the siege, in comfort and safety, were enough to discharge his duties to Sabina. But sometimes, the duties born of love made less sense than those born of righteousness, and, whether or not he owed this to Porcia Sabina, he would give it to her: One final visit with her wayward, now-aged daughter. One last chance to remind her of how much her mother had ( _stupidly, insistently_ ) loved her. One last chance to escape the city.

No burglar in Rome had as much experience as Septimius at stealth. He crept in easily, and, hearing the sounds of people talking, decided to wait. Junia was giggling with some of her friends over some faux pas made by an associate’s plebeian wife at a dinner party. She’d likely be giggling when the gates crashed in.

There were times when Septimius felt that he could never, even with another ten thousand years, manage commit enough crimes to deserve being assigned the care of Junia Tertia, as obstinate as her mother but with neither her intelligence nor her courage. No, Junia had her own stubbornness, born out of the stupidity that never let her believe that things could ever be different from how she had imagined them. But he thought that that was why Sabina had asked him to do it. Sabina’s sons were, after all, men: They had far less need of Septimius’s protection. Junia Saturnina Major was a sneaky little minx who, though followed by whispers of scandal, always stayed a step ahead of it. Junia Saturnina Minor might well decide to stand at the gates and chase away the Goths with nothing but her voice and an embroidery needle, but at least she’d do it in the awareness of what her stand would cost her. Junia Saturnina Tertia, however, was oblivious to everything that didn’t smack her in the face, and even then, she’d forget it if it didn’t accord with her preferences. She might not have been Sabina’s favorite child, but Sabina had known that she was the one who would most need a savior.

Unfortunately, her stubbornness had extended to refusing to leave Rome, in the firm belief that the army would regroup and stop the barbarians before they ever reached the city. Now she was trapped, unless she proved willing to cooperate with tricks that might sound mad to her, or for that matter most Romans. Septimius knew he hadn’t tried as hard as he might’ve to convince her before, and that betrayal of Sabina sat like a weight in his chest.

Junia’s friends drifted away, still tittering as they departed; Septimius settled on her bed. She had known about him since she was sixteen, Sabina having hidden what she believed to be a lover-ghost from her for a few extra years on the assumption that Junia Tertia wouldn’t be able to handle it. Her older sisters had known from the time they were eleven or twelve.

Julia nonetheless shrieked when she entered the room, then called, “No, no, it’s all right— I thought I saw a spider, but it’s just one of those little webby ones!” Septimius remembered, years ago, listening from a tiny cubbyhole in a flower garden as Sabina calmed little Junia with reassurances that the spiders that built webs were harmless.

“Hello, Opal,” he said, a reference to the fabulously expensive gemstone that she prized above all others. She probably prized it above her own life, for that matter. Over forty years after Sabina had given it to her, it still flashed blue and green streaks from its place beneath—a bit above, now— her breasts. “How fare you with the siege?”

“It’s terrible,” she groused. “I had thought the army would relieve us much before now. What is wrong with them?”

Septimius tried to gauge how much information she could absorb. One of the problems of dealing with Junia: He never sounded like himself, or any chosen iteration of himself, when talking to her. “It’s all about numbers. Alaric’s lost a lot of troops, but he can recruit new ones a lot faster than we can. I think the man was born to draw people to him. He’s even got some Huns on his side. He’s not bad at training them, either. They aren’t just howling barbarians with homemade spears anymore. But then, we’ve all known that since Adrianople.”

“Decimus said that was all Valens’s folly,” she said, as if the word of the husband who’d died seven years ago were part of an unquestionable scripture. “We in Italy won’t be so easy to stop.”

“Opal, _child,_ listen to me,” he said, hoping to remind her that a man who looked a third her age yet had known her as a maiden was likely to understand things she didn’t. “Italy _has_ been so easy to stop. Italy _is_ stopped. It will be a long time before Honorius can muster a force capable of driving them out, if he ever is. This city will starve and it will burn, but you don’t have to. I can get you out.”

“I don’t want out. I want the emperor to do his job.”

“And I want to be something more than a ghost,” he said, leaving out the part where he was, “but I’ll settle for saving your life. In Rome, I’m known as Septimius, now. Septimius, an effeminate rich boy descended from freedmen and probably spreading his legs for noblemen every night. It’s a good cover, because among Alaric’s army I’m someone very different. I’m a sympathizer, a runaway slave dressed in tatters, and sneaking over the walls to find out how bad the shortages are inside. But I’m a third person, too. I’m one of those lords Diocletian set up in Gaul. Even if the Huns or the Vandals or the gods know who else sacks my farms, I know places the two of us could hide. I can use my connections to get you out, I can even get Alaric to give you safe passage out of the Goths’ territory, and then we can go to Gaul and hide, but we have to go now. It’s time for me to get back to Gaul.” After all, one of those hiding places held his portrait.” And I’m not sure I can protect you if you’re here when the Goths break down the gates, anyway.”

He wished he could ignore the portrait, just forget about it and everything it protected him from. But he knew, in a way that made his skin crawl even after everything he had known in this world, that it wasn’t just that. He missed it. He was drawn to it. He craved it more than he had ever craved Sabina’s kisses.

“We won’t be sacked,” she insisted. “The army will come through. Rome has not been taken by barbarians in _eight hundred years.”_

“Almost,” he admitted. “But that’s less impressive when your memory stretches beyond that.”

“Really? A ghost that old? Just how old are you?”

He smiled. “I remember when Troy was just rebuilding from Homer’s war.”

“I don’t care. I’m not leaving. Rome is unconquerable.”

Stress hadn’t given Septimius a headache in over a thousand years, and if he left this house without one, he’d know for certain that that ailment was a thing of the past. “Junia. Listen to me. Everything dies, everything. Everything except me. But I can keep you alive, for a little while, a few years, perhaps a couple of decades. And I will. You’ll have clothes and jewels. Once the Goths are routed, you can come back and see your sons and your grandchildren. But if you want to stay here, then there is one thing that we still have to talk about.”

“What?” she asked. She probably hoped it was jewelry.

“Your mother,” he said. He tried to pitch his voice softly. How to sing a song of a mother’s love? “She loved you, and I loved her. But the way she loved you… It was beyond anything of which I am capable. I cannot copy it, I can only be inspired by it. I will carry you through the lines of the enemy, halfway through Gaul, if you let me, and I will do it because of that ember of your mother’s memory that burns in me.” He hesitated. “I know you fought. I know you didn’t always… share one another’s views. But her love for you was true and pure, and any kindness or devotion or sacrifice you see in me, she would have given you a thousandfold. Remember her well, Junia.”

She stared at him for a long moment. “Did you really love her?”

_Was I too subtle?_ thought Septimius sarcastically. “Yes, Junia, I loved her. I still love her. I don’t think that part of me will ever burn out. And she asked me, when she knew that she was dying, to take care of you. Not your brothers, not your sisters, you. My love’s a shabby copy of the gleaming jewel that was hers for you. I’m not that good, I’m not that… human, although I try.” _No, I’m half gray demonic fog. No, I refuse to believe that. I am myself. I am myself. I am myself._ “But this is the truth. Your mother loved me. I loved her. This city faces disaster, and you cannot rely on its protectors, but you can rely on my love for her.” He paused briefly, to let her think, before adding, “Come with me, Junia. I’m no Sabina, but I’ll do my best to pass on her love.”

She waited a long moment. “Her love? What love? Was it real?”

“Yes,” he murmured.

“What of my loves?” she asked, surprising him. “My children, my grandchildren?”

“I’m not sure, little Opal,” he said. “But I swear to you, I will try to save them if you will.”

She looked at him then, her face with its defined bones and slightly-wrinkled skin softening in expression. “Yes. Yes, I will leave Rome with you.” She sounded shocked.

“You’ll be safer for it,” he promised, “and Gaul is still Roman soil. Can you gather them?”

She hesitated. “Not my sons. Publius is in Ravenna, and Servius and Sextus are fighting to save us. And they will save us.”

“Junia. The city is already starving. One more mouth to feed will harm the city, not help it. And I can leave sources explaining that you escaped to Gaul. Do you know how many soldiers are already grief-stricken, knowing that their loved ones are dying in here? Have mercy on your sons. Flee with me. Take your daughters-in-law and your grandchildren, and I will get you to to safety. Please.”

Another pause, and then she spoke, tears running down her face: “Yes.”

Looking at the face of the woman he was trying to save, Septimius felt the same tenderness he had felt while observing the cultists’ death. He could still feel for life as well as death, then. He was not some monstrous predator after all. He imagined a lantern, lit and never to go out, burning through the gray fog that soaked his existence, a light of love and hope and passion and humanity. He had not lost it yet, and he swore to himself, although he no longer had a god on whom to swear, that he would not lose it in all the years to come.


	7. Duet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After centuries seeking happiness in ancient knowledge, Dorian meets a very new type of creature at a ball thrown in his current lover's honor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have mixed feelings about the later chapters myself, because I feel that sometimes Lily comes off in a more negative light than I personally see her in. I love her and have tons of headcanons about what it feels like to be her. But Dorian doesn't know all the things that we know, he's been removed from humanity for a far longer time than she has, and I've chosen to employ a tightly-limited, one-person perspective for this fic. Non-sequitur: If any of you wants to discuss _Six Lovers_ or _PD_ in general on a forum more conducive to it, I use the same pen name on Tumblr and Dreamwidth, and I'm open to praise, questions, constructive criticism, and general geekery.
> 
> Also: Sex without body heat! This was so weird to write.

**He** couldn’t believe he hadn’t sensed her before.

Dorian had sensed the presence of such common clairvoyants as the elegant Madame Kali, who used the name Evelyn Poole outside of her hobby, and of her pretty young daughter and weaker assistants or apprentices. He had no doubt that he would sense Vanessa before she the doorman admitted her. But the new woman, only not so new, gave nothing away until Dr. Frankenstein introduced her and Dorian looked her straight at her face.

At first he thought it was some strange magic. He doubted, though, that any such powerful magic would have arisen without some warning, and nothing special radiated _from_ her. For that matter, even her ordinary thoughts and feelings spread outward no more strongly than they did from anyone else. It was something inside her, or the absence of it.

It took him a moment to realize what he sensed, what it meant. He felt an hollow ache where something could have been. Something like what he himself was missing, although she did not carry his inescapable touch of the demonic. _Destiny,_ he thought. _A future._ He hated admitting that the Master’s words and Vanessa’s dismissal held that truth. She had no more business existing on this Earth in this moment than had Dorian, and yet her she stood, smiling with an excitement and nervousness that he suspected were half-faked, half-real.

And that void lurked behind the unlikeliest of faces, the face of Brona Croft.

He remembered looking into her eyes while he fucked her, the wild search for all life could offer in her final days. She had been normal then, perhaps a little stronger-willed than most, but just as much of a human, set to live a while and then die like all the rest of them. Until tonight, he had never known what it was like to meet someone like himself, someone who had no destiny remaining before them. The sensation had a quality like that of staring into a mirror or at the portrait when it had just taken his guilt or wounds. It was unsettling, an experience rare for Dorian Gray.

It was also exhilarating.

She had no destiny, yet she was here. He knew of only one explanation for that.

She was like him.

She was immortal.

He took her in: the accusation in her eyes; the anxiety she was trying to disguise as a bumpkin’s excited gawking; the intrigue she felt as she, too, recognized another being who did not belong here; and the fact that she never once considered giving up her charade or fleeing the room. She must have known that she would see him again from the time she’d reached this address, but, for some reason, she had decided that she could and would carry on as though he did not recognize her.

Perhaps she truly believed she could fool him. Immortal she might be, but he supposed she remained a child in experience, as he had for his first few centuries.

Dorian realized that he was letting the silence approach rudeness. “Ad— May I present Miss Angelique?”

“Doctor Frankenstein, Miss Lily,” came Angelique’s voice, deeper than Dorian’s. Dorian wondered if even a single guest was fooled by her skirts. _Beyond a doubt,_ he decided. He had amassed a remarkable collection of fools for this ball— rich fools, to be sure, but fools nonetheless. “That’s a shattering dress.”

“Thank you,” answered Lily, not quite simpering. He thought she was slightly overplaying the ingénue; it seemed a bit much for a woman who must have been at least nearing thirty; but it seemed to be good enough to fool her beau.

The change in music permitted Dorian his chance. “Miss Lily, May I have the honor of this dance?”

It startled both Angelique and Dr. Frankenstein. Dorian did not care, and he doubted that Miss Lily minded much, either. The doctor’s gaze spoke of a possessiveness as laughable as his susceptibility. Dorian wondered what she wanted with him.

Then again, Vanessa Ives’s doctor might not be just any doctor. He sensed nothing special about the young man, but Victor might well be involved in activities that deserved Lily’s scrutiny. He would have to ask around about the good doctor.

Miss Lily took his hand readily, and they swept through the crowd. She followed the steps of the waltz easily, where he imagined Brona would have been more at home dancing a jig, and she cut her eyes about the room just enough to suggest naive wonder, not enough to show that she recognized the exact spot where she had cringed when she realized her blood was exposed or which portraits had edged the curtain that served as the backdrop to their session. She might have practiced waltzes for years— it wasn’t impossible that someone had taught Brona this skill, or that she had simply picked it up through a few observations and informal practice—, or she might have picked it up with the grace of immortal muscles and the speed of an immortal’s mind.

“You dance beautifully,” he commented.

“Surely not,” she said, looking down and giggling. “Though Victor did his best to teach me.” Her white skin, a shade paler than Brona’s, flushed faintly in the candlelight. All white and pink and pale platinum-mixed gold, she was, all except for the telltale brown of her eyebrows and the dark hazel orbs they decorated. The perfect, childlike virgin, except old enough to be a spinster and clear in Dorian’s memory as an experienced and enthusiastic harlot. Her dress was the stuff parents wished their daughters dreamed of, pale satin and shiny gauze, with the combination of stiff corset and high neckline that controlled rather than advertised her charms. Had she picked it, or had Victor?

Oh, she was good. If he had relied only on her expressions and voice, he might have even believed that she had come back a bit simple, a little confused by the memories this night awakened. Of course, he had more resources than her outward performance. Aside from the void where others had a destiny, her presence was laced with pain and colored with exultation and bleeding out the malice that she tried to hide. He thought she knew exactly what she was, and who he was, and her ill will toward every man in the room seeped from her screens, the way light filtered through a curtain.

But she was like him, she was immortal, and he had too much reason for making his peace with her to simply dance in silence. He chose, instead, to step his way through two dances at once.

“Do you like the room?” he asked.

“All those paintings looking down on me make me a bit nervous,” she “admitted.” She gave it the verisimilitude of a child who stated an awkward truth, not the teasing of a woman flirting with a man.

“I have the strangest sense we’ve met before,” he said. That rattled her, just a little, making her eyes dart down. To the casual onlooker, she would merely look very shy; but Dorian was neither casual, nor any ordinary onlooker. “Do you think that’s possible?” he asked. “In some other lifetime, perhaps.”

“I don’t know that there are other lifetimes,” she answered. _Of course not. Such a simple, unimaginative, overprotected girl of the gentry. How could you think of such things?_.

“Surely there are,” he said. “Echoes of the past all around us.” Echoes of their cries, of the animal scream he had made when she clawed him, of their quiet words and of her shouts of release. It would have been poor form to crowd his partner, so he waited a tiny beat, only a fraction of one of the beats of the music, before adding, “My past, your past.” Another tiny beat. “Don’t you feel it?”

He supposed that he was negotiating her way through the unknown territory of her good graces well enough, for she halfway acknowledged his point. “Perhaps I do.” She looked down and giggled just enough that she would still be able to disavow the sensation as the product of her naïveté meeting with excitement and glamor.

She shared Miss Ives’s taste in accessories, along with her attitude toward the portraits. Or perhaps the doctor simply hadn’t remembered to buy her any gloves. “Your hands are cool to the touch,” Dorian commented.

“Oh— I’m sorry,” she stammered, as though mortified by this inexplicable failing on her part.

“Don’t,” he said. “They suit you. Like the touch of marble.”

He let his odd compliment, and hint at her nature, sink in for a moment. Always recognize which beats call for silence, when one is engaged in this sort of dance. “Will you think it bold if I compliment your eyes?”

“Yes,” she said, and looked shyly down again, sucking on her lip as though she might give into an embarrassed titter. She, too, understood the timing of this dance. “But please do.”

“They’re extraordinary. All those colors, green and blue and gold and brown, like forests and oceans and the earth itself, so much depth. I see an old soul, the perfect gemstone set amid the white pearls and pink diamonds and the tiny, endless threads of gold.”

“Mr. Gray!” she giggled. “My hair’s hardly endless. I had to have it cut short after my carriage accident this winter. I was so nervous of how it would look to all these grand ladies. And I’ve no diamonds.”

_Did the accident also require that you bleach it?_ he thought. And something, some _one,_ tingled in his spine and cut his black heart. Vanessa Ives was here. But Dorian was dancing with Lily now, and he never took his eyes off her.“Cut or no, it’s endless to me. Everything about you speaks of endlessness. An eternal golden age.” He smiled at her. “You would make anything seem like a diamond. Your dress takes on the sparkle of your personality.

“Thank you,” she said. He thought her blinding smile was the whitest thing in the room. “I’ve never had such a dress before. Never had the occasion to wear it until your kind invitation.”

“I’m amazed by how you picked it, with so little experience. It’s the perfect color. Sets off your blush so beautifully.”

They shifted into a different dance. From the corners of his eyes, in little swirling glitches as he turned, Dorian saw Vanessa making her way slowly across the room. She was assessing, as she had at Mr. Lyle’s, but there was something more in it this time. She was watching the room less like a predator, and more like nervy prey. He wondered what had spooked Vanessa so.

Of course, it was hardly his concern. There had been a moment, a dream, when their concerns could have been shared for all eternity, and she had chosen to walk out of it. He still felt her draw.

“How do you care for the music, Miss Lily?” Dorian asked. “If you wanted something faster, something slower, I’m sure the musicians could oblige. I would hate for your first ball to not be everything you hoped for.”

“It’s perfect,” she said. Her grin was worth a thousand chandeliers. He suspected she knew that.

“What of all the pictures?” he teased.

She didn’t blink. “I think they’re growing on me.”

He had to admit to himself, she had puzzled him a little. She had the cleverness for this charade, for the accent and the dancing and the polite chitchat; surely she had the cleverness to recognize that the charade wasn’t working on him. Any fool could have seen it, and she didn’t seem foolish.

“I’m glad,” he said. “You can never be certain these events won’t be dull, but you bring a special life to the room. Perhaps you’ll allow me to host you again, someday?”

“I can’t imagine why anybody would say no,” she said, tittering like a schoolgirl. “Everything’s so lovely, and I love the dancing.”

“So do I. There are days when I regret that we are all expected to use the sidewalks for walking. I think that London would be much more delightful if we danced everywhere.”

“I suppose it would,” she said. She looked a little overawed by his imagination. He wasn’t sure what purpose she thought such pretenses served with him, but he had to admire her skill at carrying them out.

“I see our friends are getting their breath back over by the wall,” he said. Vanessa, Angelique, and Doctor Frankenstein had gathered in an odd line, all awaiting something, likely Lily’s and his return. “Shall we join them?”

“If you like,” she said.

Vanessa and Angelique appeared to be having a cordial enough conversation— no surprise there; Vanessa still had her exceptional control—, while Doctor Frankenstein looked as though he might at any moment begin foaming at the mouth. Of course, one of the rewards of propriety was waving it in the faces of silly people who wished to throw away their own dignity out of fleeting and petty emotions.

“Miss Ives,” Dorian said, with perfect respect. “I’m so glad you could come.” He meant it. For all that he ached at the sight of what he couldn’t have, he also felt delight at her presence, and, now that he saw how plagued she was with worries, he hoped the diversion of the ball would provide some respite. But he, too, had control. He closed himself off to her, as much as he could, did not try to learn what caused her such grief, reminded himself that it was her life and not his.

“It was my pleasure,” she responded, then she gave Lily a sweet smile. Clearly, they had met before. “Lily! You look lovely.”

“Thank you,” said Lily, her voice pitched high and thin, more than ever a little girl’s treble. “Mr. Gray says pink’s my color.”

“Well, he would know,” said Vanessa.

Victor looked as if he might explode from outrage over the ladies’ shared appreciation of Dorian’s sartorial sense. Naturally, Dorian threw fuel on the fire. “Some women should only wear pale colors.” _Some women who are not present in this conversation, perhaps._

“Lily, may I have this dance?” asked Victor.

“Don’t steal her just yet,” Dorian pleaded. He wondered what Lily made of being talked about as chattel, but, whatever her reasons for choosing to play the passive, fragile damsel, she played along with it, asking Victor’s permission.

“May I stay and talk?” Then, with a tinge of resentment in her voice, “Victor’s afraid that I’ll embarrass him.”

“You couldn’t,” Vanessa offered. She appeared genuine in her attempts to reassure Lily. Dorian wondered how beset with woes the brunette must be, if she didn’t sense anything odd about Victor’s “cousin.”

“Natural grace, unschooled by society— that’s the greatest gift, isn’t it?” asked Dorian.

“Lots of grace in the country,” responded a sullen Victor. Dorian wondered if he were always this bad at repartee, or if the boy simply couldn’t think around Lily.

“I grew up in the country!” Lily exclaimed, sounding wholly unaware of the conversation’s undertones. Dorian could hear, in his own mind, the applause he didn’t offer.

“Oh, where?” he asked.

“Lake country,” Victor answered, before Lily could get in another word to his rival.

“The realm of poets,” Dorian rhapsodized.

“And livestock,” cut in Angelique. “Dance with me, Dorian.”

“In a moment,” he promised, and smiled at her. “First, a toast.” He gestured to a passing server.

“She doesn’t drink spirits,” protested Doctor Frankenstein.

“Oh, maybe just a sip,” said Lily.

The doctor paused, obviously struggling to contain his distress over this latest horror. “As you say.”

“None for you, Doctor?” asked Dorian, making his voice as innocent as Lily’s.

Vanessa came up with a bridge for the conversational gap. “He’s very wise, our doctor. I don’t know what we would do without his level head.”

“I’m not sure it’s a night for level heads, is it, darling?” asked Angelique.

“It’s a night for anything but,” said Dorian, looking around at the little knot of eccentrics he stood with. “I welcome you to my home, to my dear Angelique. And a special welcome to Miss Frankenstein”— however ridiculous that clumsy name was for her— “to our glorious city. Cheers.”

Another girlish shrug and titter from Lily, and she focused her wide dark eyes on Dorian as the song reached its end. Doctor Frankenstein reached for her hand, and she followed him back onto the dance floor. The little smile she gave Dorian as they left told him that she was merely granting the doctor the dance he had already asked for, and she would be spending more of this night with Dorian.

**Frankenstein** was an unusual name. It took little effort to discover that Victor Frankenstein’s university training had been dogged by stuffy professors who objected to his “outlandish” experiments applying electricity to dead flesh, that he had purchased both whole corpses and body parts from resurrectionists, and that he lived in a squalid apartment building in the Shad Thames. That would have been a normal place to find Brona Croft, but it seemed an ironic dwelling-place for someone who had stood out like a demigoddess among the cream of London’s society. Of course, she had little to fear from her neighbors, no matter where she lived.

Nonetheless, she acted nervous as they explored a corner of London: Not the most respectable neighborhood, but not the cheapest, either. Here one could find a postcard and painting shop that sold nudes to those who knew to ask for them, bookstores that would sell uncensored copies of the classics to respectable-looking women, and prostitutes who worked from unremarkable flats and looked respectable themselves. Here he could show her elements of her past life without breaching the propriety she gathered around her current persona.

“I was surprised to receive your invitation,” she said, still pitching her voice higher than he thought was natural for her.

“I would think you would get many,” he answered. _When in doubt, flatter. It's what I always do, isn't it?_ Even people who would have resisted flattery from most people tended to be pleased when Dorian offered it.

“No. I don’t get out much.”

“Your choice, or his?” Dorian asked. He wondered what game she was playing, with her pretense of servility, and why she was playing it. Perhaps Doctor Frankenstein was using his knowledge of life and death to threaten her.

Said doctor’s ugly display after one of Lily’s dances with Dorian made the identity of that “his” obvious. “My cousin is… protective,” she demurred.

“I don’t think you need much protecting. I believe you are perhaps more capable than you appear.”

She ducked her head. “I’m useless, really. It’s all so new.”

“Is it?” asked Dorian.

She didn’t answer, instead staring, seemingly transfixed, at a shop in front of them. By coincidence or plan, it was the one he had intended to show her. “My _Heavens,_ what is that?”

“A waxworks,” he said. “Have you never been to one?”

“I’ve never been anywhere,” she said. The implication was clear: _The desires of men have caged me, I need a man to save me, please help me._

Dorian still marveled that she imagined him fooled by her stories, but he had plenty of time to unravel them. He offered her his arm. “Then, will you allow me to escort you?”

She bit her lip, as if touching a man’s arm were a great adventure, and accompanied him into the museum.

**“It’s** awful!” she gasped, her hands over her eyes.

“It’s not real, you know,” Dorian pointed out, almost the way one would reassure a confused child.

“Oh! I’m such a goose! You must think me very silly.”

“I think you’re mysterious,” he ventured.

“Hardly that.”

“Oh, yes. The coolness of your touch, your sense of… constant discovery, and most of all, your eyes. So familiar, and yet… not.”

“You make me sound much more complicated than I am.”

He smiled and continued to walk, letting her take in the museum’s gruesome scenes.

She started when they reached the exhibit showing Burke and Hare, then laughed at herself. “What is this one?”

“Burke and Hare,” he answered. “The resurrectionists’s men, caught in the midnight act of exhuming a body.”

“Why would they do that?” she asked, appearing entranced. Maybe she was. Dorian felt a morbid and painful fascination emanating from her, along with the anger that, to his inhuman senses, always bled through her façade.

“To sell it to a doctor for medical experimentation.”

“What sort of experimentation?”

“I couldn’t say.” He suspected that she could have said, that she was watching this the way someone would read their own too-intimate diaries, horrified but unable to stop, and not at all confused.

**They** spent the next few weeks playing a game of black and white, of his demons and her ghosts. He bought her black dresses and white pearls, soft shoes that she wore lightly on her broad feet and gems to replace the paillettes from the ball. They always met after sunset, and, in the darkness of a gaslit shop, he fastened the gold clasp of a shining string behind her neck. Unheated by her skin, the tiny hairs that grew there were chill to his touch, and he shivered faintly as he bejeweled the frost. Her eyes were murky and deceptive, but he knew that inside her marble shell burned some white-hot purpose, like a brazier in an idol, awaiting the city’s sacrifice.

She walked a tightrope. When they met, she would behave as an arrogant courtesan, taking jewels for the pleasure of simply walking at his side; as the nights wore on, she became a shy little maiden. He sent her a bouquet of white roses, once, in perfect respect for both her extravagant wants and her innocent charade. He spent a whole day searching for the perfect breed of roses, the purest shade, the sweetest scent; and once he had found it, he kept them in his closet for a week before ordering a dozen fresh from the nursery. When the maid received his gift in the morning, despite the fact that it conformed perfectly to the stultifying requirements of proper courtship, it would bear the sensual power of a lover’s scent.

At last he tired of her endless game, and thought to end it by breaking their routine with a lunch date. London had not much sunlight, he told her, nothing to Italy or Siam’s, but one still had to see the city by day to fully appreciate its parade of people and its sprawl of towers.

She agreed more readily than he expected to his offer to show her the portraits in quiet. If she was also tempted to give up the game, though, she seemed to think she could win by default, not admitting any of her secrets as he described the provenance of picture after picture. He knew, however, that any such suspicions about his patience would be wrong, and waited for her to give away her secrets, by her questions if not her answer.

With the excuse that it would soon be time for tea, Dorian sat on the blue chaise and observed her pace the floor. Through the masks of the maid and the sophisticate, something else was showing, something feral and leonine, impatient.

“What things you must do here,” she remarked. Venom lurked inside her words, but he was very resistant to poison. “So much empty space to fill up with your… adventures.”

“But you like adventures.” He, too, could play the innocent.

“Who doesn’t?” She continued to pace, the train of another dress he had bought her gliding behind. “You’re a very interesting man, Dorian. You can’t be as pure as your face suggests.”

“Are you?” he asked. He thought the question fair enough, but she hesitated, uncertain and uncomfortable. Time to move with her again, to save her from missing a step of the dance. “As for the room, I find diversions to fill it. I’ve held balls, as you know; the occasional gathering of… like minded friends;… photography sessions.”

She didn’t care for that last one, but she didn’t acknowledge the hit, either. “What do you photograph?”

“All manner of life. I’ve even held Theosophical Society meetings here.”

Hatred twisted her voice into something ugly. “What’s that?”

_If you don’t know, how can you already hate it?_ “A sort of religion, seeking a personal connection to the divine truths, that… hidden knowledge.”

“You must like hidden things, for you hide very well.” Although her voice was lighter now, he could still hear the resentment within it.

“As do you.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she protested.

It seemed odd that he wasn’t more disappointed with her clumsy attempt to parry him. The nature of fascination, he supposed. “Don’t you, Brona?”

For a moment, she looked trapped and helpless. Apparently she had made no plan for dealing with his ability to recognize a former lover’s face. Her pride went beyond arrogance; it verged on madness.

Plan or no, she recovered her dignity by dangling what he didn’t know in front of him. It was a good step, for improvisation. “Or is it Lily, now?” she asked. He simply raised an eyebrow. _You tell me._ The tilt of her head could have been either a queen’s pride or an invitation to a kiss. “Or is it some divine admixture of both?”

“This room is made for secrets,” he said.

“Then tell me yours.”

He leaned forward, slowly, carefully, and pressed his lips to hers. She allowed it, thought she remained still as a statue, doing nothing to deepen the gesture to a real kiss. Only when he pulled away did her lips clutch at his, and at the space where they had been.

“In time,” he promised.

“Tell me now,” she countered, seeking his mouth again. This time she was the one to pull away. “Now… boy. Kneel.”

He considered it for a moment, unsure if he should let her lead him into that stanza, but so tempted; and he was, he admitted, a creature of temptation. The currents of power, both preternatural and human, charged the air and enlivened nerves from his skin to his heart. Who knew where this would end, how far she might go? With her infinite, driving ambition, she considered herself a worthy opponent, and perhaps she would one day be. He hoped she was made of such stuff, for that was the material that also made a worthy partner.

“Kneel, boy,” she repeated.

He yielded to her magnetism, to her game of strength, in a mixture of amusement and curiosity and desire. What happened next, where would her rage and craving for dominance take her?

She cupped his face in one of her hands, just so. With the right pressure, she could snap his neck at that angle.

“Now, boy,” she murmured, “you tell me your secrets, and I’ll tell you mine.”

He lifted his face. She permitted it, although her hand followed him closely, still ready to break his neck.

“You want to share history?” he asked her, with a pout.

“And the future,” she promised.

_“I don’t know that you have one,”_ rang Vanessa’s voice. But he did have a future, even without a destiny. He made his own future, had been making a future for centuries, alone.

Lily was something new. Perhaps she was something that was free of the old rules of destiny. And he was freed, too, by his own refusal to care. Whatever the gods no longer wanted from them, they would write their own _in the blood of mankind._ He did not know if the phrase was his or hers.

“I was painted,” he whispered, encouraging her to move her own face closer.

“Reborn,” she said. She opened her wide mouth just a little, pressed her tongue out of it to taste his lips, then moved to cover his mouth with hers. Her tongue was cold against the heat of his, its motions delicate and deliberate.

“Created,” he said, when she drew back.

“Remade,” she said, and knelt to face him.

“By a god.” He caught his breath as her cool hands unbuttoned the top of his shirt and ran across his neck and chest.

“By a man.” She let him unbuckle the tight waistband of her dress, then slip his fingers around back to undo its fastenings. She could hardly breathe, a style he would have considered cruel, had he not doubted her need for air.

“Who abandoned me, never to return.” She undid the buttons of his waistcoat and flung it aside.

“Whom I outgrew, and abandoned.” Her breathy voice was triumphant. He peeled away the dress and tossed it to aside like the waistcoat.

“To make my own life,” Dorian said. The busk of her corset parted beneath his fingers while she unbuttoned his trousers, and he threw her cage from their sight.

“Forever more,” she panted, leaning back and pulling him down with her.

“Not alone,” he said. A question mark clung precariously to the end of the word, ready to fall off, not ready to be acknowledged.

“Never,” she responded. One of her hands ran firmly between his shoulder blades; the other slid between them.

He heard himself cry out, just slightly, when she pressed him inside her. Every part of her was cold, all except for that hungry, deadly flame, and he shuddered as he grew used to the feeling.

He kissed her, lightly, delicately, as if it were a first kiss and not one shared during the act of sex. She made no response to that. She was too quiet, too restrained, and he wondered how many more bargaining sessions it would take before she opened herself to finding comfort in his body. She looked up into his face and, as if to answer his question, rolled him over.

Her hips were almost motionless except for where they followed his own undulations, but her face changed, and she raised her tense strong arms before her. Tight hands, strong hands, pressed straight on his windpipe, completely shutting off his breath. For the first time since they had lain down, he thought he saw a gleam of growing ecstasy in her eyes. This was the real woman, the real monster, the real goddess on Earth. He could not, alas, experience the heightened sensations that others did when their air was so constricted, but he delighted in the raw truth of her combined viciousness and pleasure. One could spend a lifetime with a woman who would never so freely give away her mind.

“How old are you?” she asked, because she never stopped bargaining. Her hands let up enough for him to croak out a response.

“Ancient,” he gasped.

“Can you die?” she queried.

He felt his face grin without any need for the pretense of politeness. His revelry in this, in inviting her to see what he was made of just as she showed him her own material, was natural and pure. “Find out.”

Instead, she removed her hands from his throat. “When we could do so much together? This sad little world is ours.” She leaned close to him, nuzzling his neck and ear. He reached behind her, tracing her back, feeling the cold flesh over hard ribs through the thin black muslin.

Dorian Gray would not have been shocked if she had simply nipped him, nor if she had sunk her teeth deep into his shoulder as Vanessa had. However, he had not expected, or thought to ask for, the feeling of her biting down with preternatural strength on the thin meat of his ear, ripping the lobe free of his head. He screamed, panicking, trapped, trying to break free.

But it was not the horrific attack he feared. He was not trapped ( _for the ages, bound for all time to the fog,_ came the thought, born of dizzying, sickening memory). Lily merely spat out his earlobe and released him.

“Go heal yourself,” she commanded, and added, pledge and challenge both, “my beloved immortal.”

Dorian recognized the odd emotion he felt when he looked up at her. It wasn’t at all the pain; he was used to that, had himself done worse things to his body. It was fear of the fact that here was someone who might be his equal, playing the game with him. Though it subsided quickly in the face of his knowledge— the portrait would heal him immediately, and he thought that Lily lacked the experience to find any way to injure him permanently—, that realization made him giddy, almost dizzy. Yes, finding his match, even in the swirling magic that breathed excitement into 1890s London, was more a matter of negotiation than fate, of trial than chance. But what rewards there were to the parley. It was as though two expert dancers were studying a new form together, their steps imaginative and uncertain, and the stage across which even gods played would change to suit their movements.

The portrait took his wound meekly, not wanting to fight. He thought it knew that this mutilation had not been his plan, but he’d cut off fingers before, just to make it suffer. The old demon was a coward, one who had wanted to die long before he had ( _and what does that make you now, Dorian Gray?_ ) and feared pain more than he did. For a moment, its own ear showed ragged and bloody, before returning to the same grotesque yet fixed appearance it was trapped with.

Lily awaited him in the ballroom. She had tucked up her knees and wore a blank expression, not an aroused woman; but they both knew that he had given her what she wanted. Dorian had no time to think of why she did not want this with him, not with the pale, perfect skin of her bare arms shining in the dim light. He knew that she would be cool and slick and unchanging, eternal as he was eternal. All their negotiations and exchanges and offers and counteroffers led, he had to believe, to a better union. The hollow where destiny was absent would be filled with a shared purpose: To enjoy, to take, to seize all this world could offer, together.

Whole but still bloodied, he approached her. She lay submissively, even passively, back, slowly lifting her skirts. He thought that she had to try too hard to enjoy it, that her focus on the physical sensations seemed strained. He had no idea why. They had all they could ever hope for in an eternity with each other. _This sad little world is ours._ What would they make of the world, what schemes did she harbor? Nothing was beyond them.

Nothing is beyond our grasp. The vistas he had seen, armies and cities, deserts and forests, stretched before him. In the back of his mind he heard the cries of humanity, the endless din that he heard century after century as the wretched creatures found new methods of inflicting misery on one another in their brief lives, the dull noise blending into one clamor, an amorphous and sordid thing that he and Lily cast off, and they were free, free and strong and powerful, striding like gods across the Earth _when the old gods walked_ now was the time of the new gods, they were the new gods, they reigned together in the a blinding light and a brilliant dark—

He shuddered in climax and he saw her, saw the fire and death, _the blinding light_ and _the brilliant dark,_ in her eyes, all around him, encompassing the universe. The moment passed, as all moments did, and he wondered at its meaning. What imagination of hers had he faintly sensed, what fury, what future made in defiance of prophecy? He felt weak and slack. _I may be shattered, but my pieces are sharp enough to cut,_ he thought, and realized that he was thinking up threats to the portrait rather than attending the woman beneath him.

He kissed her jawline, a little uncertain of his next step, whether he should offer worship or affection or some further demonstration of his powers. He laughed at the thought, softly enough that she could take it as a sound of satisfaction. They had more than enough time for every kind of gesture they could ever want from the other.

And their time started now. “The world is ours, Lily?”

She took one of his hands in hers, and examined the edges and veins with her fingertips. Her palms were callused, unlike his. He supposed that they matched her washerwoman’s arms. Neither attribute was fashionable, but they suited a woman who had worked and fought and bled, and even now would choose to do so toward some unknown purpose.

“Yes, my love,” she said.

“And what would you choose to do with it?”

She turned on her side to face him. “I would change it forever.” She closed her eyes for a moment and inhaled and released a wavering breath. Pain stained the ambition surrounding her, worked through it in hateful streaks, before she suppressed it. “I would make it anew. The old leaders have failed, but we, my love, we have the strength to take it from them. We will rule, you and I, over an army of perfect children who will never die, the downcast ones whose eyes will now see the rich and the mighty at kneeling at their feet. We will lift them up, those poor girls of the night, seduced and used and thrown out, and make them nobles of our court, and all the men who ever harmed them will till the fields and work the factories like beasts of burden while our daughters dance in palaces the likes of which no one has yet seen.”

“You know the secrets of transforming them?” he asked. What would have seemed like simple madness from any human raving on a street corner would sound perfectly sensible from a woman who could live forever and resurrect the dead.

“Oh yes,” she breathed. “I know how to take them from their old lives into the new.” Her wide mouth twisted. “There’s very little to it, actually. My maker’s plans were things of elegant simplicity. He never wrote down the process, but he didn’t need to. It showed, to anyone but a simple brute, in his equipment and his supplies. The tub, the chemicals, the electricity that he so quaintly terms ‘galvanic energy’— I know it all.”

“Then our weapons shall be easy to acquire.” Even the least reputable of druggists had to advertise their presence, if only by word of mouth.

She looked at him, as if he had just made another trade offer that she wanted to accept. He hadn’t even realized he was doing it; to offer something desired was simply his nature, the way it was hers to return the favor.

Perhaps it was a sign that they were, gods be damned, meant to be together.

“My precious, beautiful immortal,” Lily purred, touching his face as she had his hand. She nudged him onto him back and straddled him. Dorian wondered, amused, if her clients had accustomed her to more stamina than he would have given them credit for.

“Am I?” he asked. “Yours?”

“Forever,” she murmured, smiling so broadly that she could hardly kiss him.

**Lily** loved waltzes. Dorian didn’t know if she had wanted to dance more of them as Brona, or if this obsession were new to her. Aside from the details of her resurrection, he never her about her mortal life. He liked to focus on the fact that they were together from now on, and that her personal history would soon be swept aside with all the other detritus of humanity’s reign. In truth, he would have liked to have learned more. She longed, not merely for domination, but for vengeance. The past drove her, haunted her, in a way that the future had so long tormented Dorian. Considering that she did not intend to direct any of it at him, though, it was hardly his concern, and he could not think of any way to pry that would not have been unforgivably gauche.

Instead, they went shopping for tailcoats and ballgowns, for the newest cylinders and the purest candles. Once, Lily bought a gown of ivory silk, bedecked with bows, and had him put her into it as though she were a doll. She had her own chambers, in the way of queens, and they gave the bed its first nuptial use before he fastened her corset. She still seemed more acquiescent than eager; it was not that she faked her pleasure, but that she either did not care about it or could not decide if she wanted it. Even when his tongue traced the ridges and valleys and swollen peak between her legs and she arched her back and writhed, she stifled her cries, and her hands clutched the expensive fabric of her petticoats rather than touching his hair or face.

They finished face to face, Lily lying on her back and staring, not past, but almost through him, as if she could will him into transparency and stare at something better. He pushed away the annoying thought. She would have to be a fool to imagine that she could find a superior partner, whether in bed or in her schemes of conquest.

She sat up, cross-legged, almost lost in the billow of her undergarments, and silent as the grave in which she had never slept. The games never seemed to end with her; this one was of guessing.

“Would you like a washcloth, darling?” he asked.

“No,” she said, in a hard voice. “Leave it.” She stood, her voice reverting to its extreme of little-girl highness and lightness. “But will you fix my hair for me? It gets awfully tangled when I move about so.”

He fetched a hairbrush from her dresser. Ivory, with soft bristles, and her name monogrammed into the handle, the brush seemed to be a part of a whole set. He wondered when she’d ordered them.

Her hair was straightened to match his own, and the slick threads fell readily back into place. “There now,” he told her. “Fit to hold court.”

“Thank you,” she breathed. “Won’t you help me with the rest?”

“Mm.” He wrapped the corset around her. “Shall we loosen this?”

“No.” She looked beyond him again. “I want to remember the cage in which my fellows live.”

He didn’t have a reply to that, so instead, he hooked the busk together. The coutil corset was lined with satin inside and brocade outside. Its pattern, so subtle in the ivory silk, was one suggesting violence, a sword repeated over and over, a fact that both startled and delighted him. He wondered where the stay-maker had come up with it. Lily might even have ordered a special run of this pattern.

The corset was, at least, looser than the ones she usually wore. She must have planned on a looser one when she had the dress made, for the gown fit perfectly. Her stare in the mirror showed her satisfaction.

He found her new shoes in a box in her closet while she sat on the edge of the bed and rucked up her skirts. She had a dancer’s long, strong legs, and when she set her feet back down with the high-heeled shoes on them, he could see the way they made the muscles flex in her calves. The tops of her stockings were becoming soiled.

“Can you dress without me, Dorian?” she asked. It was, obviously, a rhetorical question. Dorian had lived for decades without a valet, and didn’t need her to act as one now.

“Certainly. Shall I meet you in the ballroom?”

“Mm, of course.” She smiled at him, a lovely, false thing that reminded Dorian of himself. He didn’t know if the pang was the discomfort of recognition, or the relief of finding someone so profoundly suited to him.

**He** had wondered, from her mood for being cosseted and looked after, if he would have to light all the candles himself, but she had taken care of most of them by the time he arrived. One could have lit a respectable ballroom with the candles they were using together. They were of beeswax; unscented, as he had not known what mood they would be seeking; and prolific. Their heat gave Lily’s skin a warmth that exertion did not, but neither of the dancers broke a sweat.

Neither of them looked away from the other when they heard the steps of an intruder approaching. Dorian saw, as they turned about, the face of Victor Frankenstein, glassy-eyed and pale.

Doctor Frankenstein shut off the gramophone, ending the waltz, but they kept dancing. “Victor!” called out Lily. “How lovely of you to join us!”

“Stop it!” cried the doctor.

Lily gently brought the dance to an end. “Cousin, how you look! Are you quite all right?”

“Would you like to sit down?” Dorian offered.

“Spare me your gallantry,” Victor sneered. Dorian gave him an expression of polite disapproval combined with sympathy.

“Lily, you must come home,” Victor continued.

“But darling,” Lily told him, “I am home.”

Dorian took her hand. “Really, doctor,” he said, in a tone one would use to explain the obvious to an idiot, “Lily is not a girl for tenement garrets, now is she? And on the South Bank, no less.”

Victor pulled a pistol from his coat. Lily and Dorian exchanged guffaws.

“Oh! Now there’s gallantry,” she said.

“Who did you have in mind to shoot?” asked Dorian.

“Stop it!” Victor shouted. He lowered his voice to address Lily. “Lily, please come back. I love you. We can make it our home again, I promise.”

“Our home,” Lily said, and it was half a question. “Our bed in the storm, you mean?”

That meant something to Victor. His deranged eyes twitched.

“You’re too sweet,” said Lily. “The night I took your awkward virginity… All thumbs, he was,” she reminisced, glancing at Dorian, then turning to glare at Victor, daring him to try to kill her, “all trembling and terrified—“

“Stop it,” Victor demanded.

“—Like a grubby little boy cramming his hand into the sweet jar.”

Victor pulled the trigger, then looked shocked. In truth, it was something of a shock for Dorian as well. Although he could sense Lily’s strangeness, he had spent millennia watching people die when such wounds occurred. He had never before seen them simply go ignored in anyone but himself.

Some sweet elixir, which he imagined felt similar to the effects absinthe had on mortals, rushed to his head when she straightened to again stare at her former beau. Dorian could all but hear the scales as the excitement uncoiled inside him.

“Please, Creator,” she said, her voice now deep and knowing, “you made me too well for that.” To the new shock on Victor’s face, she added, “Oh, yes. I know. Always have. You were so… _sublimely…_ malleable.”

The blood was soaking through her dress, a scarlet fall down the ivory wall. Dorian wondered if he would feel life or death _“or some divine admixture”_ if he tasted it, and he knew that he would feel Victor’s anger. He extended a finger, touched the wound, and drew it back to his mouth.

_Perfection._ He smiled at Victor as he delicately sucked in his bottom lip. The taste was exquisite, perhaps mostly because of the setting.

Victor fired again, shooting Dorian through the heart. This time, he didn’t feel much of a shock, just an amusingly mundane pain and an awareness of his power compared to the young man’s.

“You’ll have to do better than that, sport,” said Dorian.

Victor seemed to have an unending supply of shocked looks at the ready. Dorian wondered how long they would play with him.

“Shall we kill him now?” mused Lily.

“They are made for killing,” commented Dorian.

“Mm,” she agreed.

“You know,” said Dorian, taking in the tears running down Victor’s face, “I’ve experienced so many sensations over the years, but never one precisely like this. Complete supremacy.”

“Cruelty, even.”

“Ascendancy.”

“Conquest.” She paused, looking Victor over. “And him? Shall we murder him right now?”

“Entirely up to you, darling.”

She paced up to Victor, sweeping him before her charisma. The overmatched doctor kept stepping backward as she approached. Dorian felt that at any moment Victor might ignite from the heat of her flame. “No. Let him live. He may still prove useful to us. Let him live with the knowledge of what he has created: A master race, a race of immortals, meant to command. Soon he will kneel to us.”

“They all will,” Dorian agreed.

“When our day has come, you will know terror,” she said. She caught Victor’s head in her hands. Pearls gleamed on her wrists. “Until then, little man, live with the knowledge of what you have spawned, and suffer.”

It took Doctor Frankenstein a moment to recover enough from his shock to give into his fear. He staggered backwards to the edge of the room, then ran for the door to the house. _You’ll have to run farther than that, “little man,”_ thought Dorian.

Dorian reset the gramophone, and the waltz began again from the beginning. Lily held out her hands, wrists bent at an exaggerated angle, in entreaty: _Won’t you dance with me? Please?_ He took one of her hands, put his free arm into a right angle behind his back, and re-entered the dance. Bright red blood painted the black floor, and hot white flames cast a golden haze. They danced together as if in a wonderland, a spell, a dream soon to trap the world, like resin spreading and turning to amber, preserving the insects as fossils while their two spirits drifted through, twirling and smiling, always dancing, to the end of the world.


	8. The White Coin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the third century BCE, Dorian Gray goes head to head with the demon in the portrait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is by far the strangest chapter of the story. For some reason, my brain insisted that the way to get Dorian's feelings about the portrait out in the open was through a monologue in the form of a poem, which comes toward the end of the chapter. Since I didn't want to trouble anyone who would (understandably) think that what has meter in modern language would not have it in modern English, I didn't format it as a poem. Instead, I leave it to the reader to decide whether or not they want to pick out the rhythm. If you don't, then it's going to be a really weird bit of speech, but the weirdness won't alter any key information.

Greco-Bactrian Kingdom  
C. 220 B.C.

**Akakios** awakened so thirsty that he couldn’t swallow, and feeling the edges of a tiny face pressing, too hard and sharply to be real, into his palm. Just from its touch, he could tell that it showed Eurythdemus rather than Diodotus. That was strange: The Greek kings of Bactria showed no originality whatsoever in the portrayal of their faces, so much so that the new king’s decision to mint new coins with his “own” visage struck Akakios as ludicrous. You could hardly tell the faces apart by careful inspection, let alone an accidental touch.

Even stranger: He didn’t remember setting his palm down. He didn’t remember the rest of him collapsing here, either.

He sat up, then stood. For a moment, he felt elation, as he thought he pieced it together. It had all been a nightmare, a thousand-year dream. He was human, he still scribed at Tyrens, and he would live out his life as a mortal who had never encountered a god.

The sickening mind of the portrait tainted his thoughts, tinged them all a misty gray, and he realized he was wrong. Somehow, this was his life. But how did he not remember the last… hours? Days? Years? Akakios had not lost fainted in centuries, and he had not slept in a millennium.

Grit clung to him, and the wind on this perfectly normal spring day felt as harsh as lye. He recalled a time, long ago, during the madness of his new immortality, when he had become obsessed with the idea that the gray fog still filled his pores and had flayed all of his left forearm in a useless attempt to clean it. It had felt like the wind today.

_Feeling. My demon— no, not mine, never mine— was joined to me so that it could do as it wanted, feel as it wanted._ No doubt it thought that making him feel was an appropriate punishment for his restriction of its feelings. “What did you do?” he tried to ask. He wasn’t sure if he actually spoke the words, or if he heard them only in his mind. They echoed as though a trumpet spoke them. He looked too far upwards, and the rays of the sun stabbed through his vision, blinding him. For a moment he saw only a black background with abstract splashes of whirling color.

_Steady,_ he reminded himself. _I will conquer this. “You,”_ he added, in case the portrait was listening.

He missed the sea. It seemed like a strange thing to miss, at the moment, when he could have been mourning his humanity or his memory or everyone he had lost through the ages. Instead, he missed the sea, the way it transferred its energy so perfectly, its waves rushing from his scalp through his toes even as the water cradled and soothed him.

It was so much better than this burning wind.

He looked down and saw the coin shining in the light. Although it hurt his eyes, he was glad, for nothing else near looked like it, and it made a focal point. The gleam of the strange alloy, something that looked like silver but was neither silver nor fraudulent, reminded him of the sea, shining white beneath the sun.

_You can’t drown in a coin,_ he thought. But then, he couldn’t drown in the sea either, could he? And he wouldn’t want to, no, he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t give up, not until he found a way to separate himself from the portrait and live out the life he deserved.

_Do it. Free us._ The thought was cool and liquid in his mind, and it took a moment for him to realize it wasn’t his. In fact, he still wasn’t certain that the portrait hadn’t taken it from a wish he already had.

The jumbled blocks of thought fell into a recognizable shape then, a little fuzzy, but still a construction, not a collapse. He recalled the demon’s desire. It wondered (and tried to pretend it knew) that to destroy the material in which it would trapped would kill them both. The monster wanted it; so, if he were honest, did Akakios. But he wanted victory more.

He stared at the gleaming coin. It was such a pretty gray, so different from the portrait, and yet if he put the coin before the portrait, they would match. Gray on gray on gray, gray fog and gray copper and magic like cold gray iron binding him to the monster…

**He** heard himself gasp out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. Picking up the coin, he went to track down his caravan.

He had only a vague memory of the route he had taken when he fled; it had been generally in the opposite direction of the portrait and what it wanted. He felt certain that he should head north, and his freshest tracks suggested east, but it quickly became apparent that he had zigged and zagged in his flight, and the tracks wore out as he traced them. Akakios wondered how long he had spent away from the caravan, and if the other members were looking for him, or if they had decided to take advantage of his disappearance and divvy up his goods among themselves. If they happened on the portrait and discarded it, he didn’t know what would happen, to it or to himself. For that matter, he wasn’t sure what would happen to them. He didn’t think the portrait could communicate in any clear fashion with anyone but Akakios, but he hadn’t thought it still had the ability to cause him blackouts, either.

Well, so much for them. If they stole his goods, he hoped the portrait made them pay before they used it to fuel a campfire. Of course, if the demon died, so would he.

Without the demon’s power, he probably wouldn’t be able to stand, let alone search for the caravan. How long had he spent running, before the fight in his mind caused him to collapse on the ground? At least three days, he thought, trying to remember the rising and setting of the sun and stars. The moon had been all dark one night, and this evening, he could see that it made a little crescent in the sky. _(And the full moon in my pouch, shining like silver…_ Could he go mad from thirst, or would the demon lend him its bitter strength?) His water skin was empty, and it couldn’t have held much to begin with. His feet were covered in blood from blisters, his eyes were sticking to the lids, and his lips showed more cracks than skin when he touched them. He took off his shoes and hung them over his shoulders: It was less painful to walk on the sand and the rocks now than to feel the remaining scraps of skin being rubbed loose.

Akakios had collected the materials for a torch, the better to be seen if anyone missed his charm and came looking. Now he spent the better part of an hour scraping rocks together to make sparks and wishing he’d had a set of good flints in his pouch when he’d fled. 

Near midnight, he happened on a village. The goats were locked away for the night, but a watchman kept an eye on the fold. Akakios approached slowly, wanting to give him time to determine that he was not the vanguard of a gang of thieves.

“Hello!” he tried to say, and he would have followed it with _My name is Akakios,_ but his throat could no longer form true words. He felt somewhat embarrassed by his inability to make a proper introduction for himself.

The watchman looked back and forth, and called out in what Akakios thought was Yuezhi. That presented both concern and comfort: While Akakios hadn’t yet learned to speak Yuezhi, the presence of a Yuezhi settler indicated that he wasn’t too far south of the caravan trail.

Akakios let his appearance speak for him, since his throat couldn’t. He let the watchman take in his appearance: Pale eyes, expensive Indian silks cut to make a Grecian tunic, Yuezhi jades dangling in complex Bactrian patterns, and all the blisters and cracks and dirt that one would expect to find on a lost merchant.

The watchman seemed to decide that Akakios posed no imminent danger. For once, this assessment of him was accurate. He didn’t want anything from the villagers except for some water and bread and directions to the caravan, and he was willing to pay for them.

Akakios didn’t understand the next few words the watchman said, although they sounded familiar enough that he thought they might be an attempt at Koine, but it didn’t matter. The way the man helped him to sit and offered him a dipper of water said enough for the moment. Akakios drained the water, then another dipper.

The man said something else indecipherable, then, in Koine, “Slow. Slow. Drink water slow. Too dry inside.”

Akakios lolled against the side of the goat pen. Now, on top of everything else, he was going to have the stink of goats in his clothes.

With his throat wet, he made another attempt to speak. “Thank you.” It sounded rough and ugly, but he felt better for having managed some modicum of courtesy.

“Search for you,” the man said. “Greeks. Merchant caravan. Messengers.”

It made sense, Akakios supposed, that any Yuezhi in this region would be most familiar with the words of commerce.

“When?” he asked.

“Yesterday.” The man looked frustrated. “Not long. Ask to send you to them if we find you.”

To the next stop, Akakios guessed. He wondered how much of a reward his fellows had offered to bring him in. It could still be managed, if the villagers lent their horses to the effort. After all, wagons weighed more than men, and the caravan leader kept stopping at every decent-sized town and most of the small villages to try figuring out what would be in demand next year.

At any rate, he’d be closer to the caravan, and the portrait, if he found the stop than he would be in the wilds. He could certainly give the villagers enough of a reward, regardless of whether or not they caught up with the caravan.

“Take me to the meeting place,” he croaked out, hoping that a man who barely spoke Koine would understand the Koine of a man who could barely speak.

The Yuezhi patted his shoulder. “Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Rest.” He reached down and lifted Akakios in his arms, carrying him like a child to the door of a shack.

Akakios had spent nights in better places: The shack was cramped and unlit, full of what he guessed were the goatherd’s wife and children. The wife hung back and said something to one of the children, who ran off, to get a healer, maybe. Akakios assumed the other children were staring at the stranger, since that was what most children would have done, but he couldn’t see much.

The messenger-child returned with a wrinkled old man, bearing a single tallow candle and a bag that smelled of herbs. He spoke the local Bactrian dialect, which Akakios had learned, although the healer used it mainly to tell Akakios what he already knew: That he was dehydrated, that he seemed surprisingly strong, and that such foot injuries were prone to infection. Akakios laughed at the last, knowing he had not suffered any infections in hundreds of years, and the healer looked at him tolerantly, probably believing that Akakios’s experiences had left him deranged. Akakios suffered through the healer’s treatments, thanked the family for its hospitality, and then saved everyone from the awkwardness of conversation by pretending to sleep until dawn.

**One** of the village men escorted Akakios to the next stop the following day. As the caravan had seemingly not yet arrived, he rewarded the Bactrian personally with his necklace and most of his coins, all save the strange gray-white ones that were not silver. He could live on charm for a while, if he needed to, and he would rather prepare himself for his test without a stranger’s kindly intrusive presence.

The caravan arrived shortly before sunset, with great excitement over the discovery of the young lost traveller. Akakios smiled and greeted and hugged, but his palms were sweating and his mouth kept going dry from the thought of his night’s task. He ignored his fears and concentrated on finding what he needed. _Gray, the gray of iron chains…_

This was no backward village, but a medium-sized town on the trade route. In the shops and bazaars he found glass, turquoise, jade, and lapis lazuli gems; delicate gold and silver work; silks for tunics and intricately-patterned woolen rugs; scrolls written in Koine and Persian; myrrh, frankincense, and even dragon’s blood for incense; ultramarine and cinnabar; opium, wine, and even kat from Africa or Arabia; and, in a stall run by a habitual cotton merchant and occasional slaver, a set of manacles that he purchased with his replenished funds.

Akakios stripped away the heavy wrappings of the portrait. It loomed over him, cold and cruel, its eyes full of ambition, and why not? It was standing. The wretched thing had found the courage to face him. As for Akakios, he felt absurd. He had manacled himself before it and placed a coin between them to distract himself if this hurt him to badly. He knew that he was shaking.

A strange thing happened, as he stared at the portrait. He continued to shiver, so much that it seemed more surprising than not that he managed to retain his grip on the coins. But here was a creature that knew him, that knew his every weakness, and that would feel his every strength. It would feel it, and would know it. The grinding fear changed to a soaring elation. A burning cord ran between his mind and the demon’s, and with every pull by one the other was forced to clutch flames. In all the world, were there two other beings who could claim more closeness to each other? When he crushed the thing, it would writhe in his palm, in his skin, and he would know its surrender.

“Kneel,” he commanded, his voice soft.

The demon glared at him. Akakios smirked back at it, then turned to his other things. He stuffed a shirt into his mouth and lifted a dagger from its place atop a chest. Maneuvering it around the heavy cuffs and chains would be awkward, but not impossible.

He withdrew it from its sheath and thought words to the portrait, as best he could. _“You know, I’ve noticed how easily hurt you are. How fragile. That’s the danger to invading people’s feelings, you know. Their bodies, their minds. I know that you feel pain when I do, for as long as I do, and that when I go to you, you have to take whatever injury I have suffered and heal yourself. After all, you have no one else to do it, do you? You don’t have much of a choice. Or if you do, you pick the easy one.”_ He knelt on the floor of the wagon, not in submission, but in perfect grace and confidence. Laying his left hand on the floor, he raised the dagger in his right. _“I have the strength to do otherwise.”_

The demon remained standing, but its eyes twitched. It feared what he might do. Oh yes, it feared him.

_“I was distraught yesterday,”_ Akakios continued. _“I was tired and frightened, and I didn’t know what that meant. But then I realized: Beyond the pain, beyond the exhaustion and fear of you, there was something else: Relief. I was relieved, because when there was no one left for me to play with— no matter whom I loved—, you gave me an opponent I could savor. Not that you’ll last that long.”_

Akakios pressed onto a finger with the dagger and began to move it back and forth, as if he were sawing a log. The overflow of his screams emerged through the shirt, agony laced with triumph, with power. He wondered if this could also make him faint, but it didn’t seem to be happening.

He sliced into the white bone, saw the thick crimson marrow. Looking up, he observed the portrait’s mouth open in a soundless scream, its eyes bulging with pain. Its index finger disappeared as his own began to regrow, and blood dripped from its stump, but his enemy healed itself.

_“You take my wounds,”_ Akakios told it. _“You take my failings, my crimes. And now, you will take my chains.”_ He envisioned them where he wanted, holding the demon kneeling at the portrait’s base. _“Kneel, you slave. Kneel before your master.”_ He hesitated, just cutting into the skin of his left hand’s middle finger. _“No? Not yet? I’m so glad.”_

That finger was a little thicker; it took a little longer to cut through. Akakios’s vision was a hazy red, and for a moment, he thought that sheer physical weakness might force him to postpone the deed. He couldn’t tell how much of the dizziness he felt was pain, and how much delight in his conquest. But he finished slicing through the finger, although the top of it had healed by the time he reached the bottom, and so it remained a part of him.

In the portrait, blood dripped from the demon’s hand. Despite the slight wobbling of his legs, Akakios stood. _“Kneel, boy. Or do I have to ask again?”_

He could hear its screams in his mind, so clearly that it took him a moment to realize that they were not really in his ears. Screams of fury, of fear, of pain.

He pressed the knife down again. _“Tell me how it hurts to know that you can only hurt through me. Tell me that you’ve truly earned to feel my feelings for me. Why do you think that I will give my life to let you die? I live myself all for myself and will eternally._

_“I see your cowardice and fear: You took but could not conquer. You claimed my life, you claimed my pain, but you can withstand neither. I conquer you when I own myself. I feel for myself and I’m saving myself, and I’ll own my pain alone._

_“Does it hurt, when I cut my flesh? Do you want to die to flee? Do you need to know just how much I can do? Or will you kneel in your place?_

_“It frightens you, to see me now, to see the gushing blood. It’s a crimson flow you can never drink while you live in your painting. There’s nothing in this world for you to taste unless it tempts my human tongue. Do you miss the taste? Do you miss the blood? I pity no one save myself, and choose my wines alone._

_“I know you fear me for my strength: For the soul that you are not. I’m stronger than a painted god. I’m stronger than a king. I rule my flesh without your care, and name myself my god. I own this touch and I own this life, and I own my pain alone.”_

_He managed to slice through one finger faster than the demon could repair the connection and tossed the severed digit at its feet. “You think you’re a god, so tell me why I control you more than them? The ones who’ve died in my embrace, or been killed by my hands? Their lives were in my hands. Then how much more are you?”_

The demon seemed to curl inward, to recoil, being dragged into a kneeling posture, although Akakios could not tell how much of its motion resulted from its will and how much from his fear. A bead of sweat ran into his raw right eye, and, in the sensitivity brought on by his battle, it felt like acid. The white glint of the gray coin showed through the haze, and he clutched at that gleam, as though it were the only star in a sky turned black and devouring.

_“You filled me with mist of gray, but the white shine still beams through. There’s no god who can rust the heart in me, and none corrupts my soul. We twist ourselves and pour ourselves into crucibles of chance; our nature’s still the same. You may have pushed me to this shape, but not your element. I shine through the mist even in black midnight and the gray hides not a ray. I claim myself, and I conquer you, but I’ll never say you’re mine. You’re a land I own in a distant place, and I own the pain alone.”_

Akakios rose, watching the demon settle lower in the painting, its head beginning to bow. _“Kneel. I own my actions. I own my feelings. I own my pain. And I own you. Kneel. Kneel unless you want me to make you feel more than you can bear.”_

With a hateful glare, the creature rested on its knees. _“No,”_ Akakios told it. _“Finish putting your head down. You shouldn’t have let me see you start to, because now, I want to see what you look like when you can’t even see. Do you shiver, I wonder? Do you shake? Will I hear your pointed demon fangs chatter?”_ He clenched his fists, making the iron manacles press against the bones. _“Now. Take them. Take them the way you take my wounds.”_

The portrait screamed, and Akakios understood that it wanted him to believe it could do no such thing. It had to take his injuries; it could not take his chains. Did Akakios himself think that? _No._ He pushed back the portrait’s flailing power.

_“We’ll find out,”_ he said. _“If all you can take is my wounds, then you’re about to take more of them. Or will you take my chains? Will you bind yourself to the walls of what you think is your hell? I should warn you that I can make it a worse one.”_ He made to pick up the knife again.

It seemed impossible that the demon’s shriek was not heard throughout the town and on the other side of the world. But the chains slowly began to dissolve from Akakios’s arms and appear in the portrait. Forcing his mind through the layers of confusion and obfuscation, Akakios realized that the demon wasn’t taking them; instead, Akakios himself was controlling it. It was helpless, shuddering and spasming almost as though it were suffering a seizure.

“Remember,” Akakios breathed aloud, as his wrists reappeared, “I own the pain. I always own the pain.”


	9. Troika

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dorian and Lily rescue a young woman to serve as their lieutenant, but the alliance disintegrates before their plans can come to fruition.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is really long-- as in, 14,355 words long. I thought about splitting it in two, but decided that the thematic consistency (one affair per chapter) was worth the uneven length. "Troika" is dedicated to Dorian's three-way relationship with Lily and Justine, which spans most of season 3: Hence the unusual length.

**The tub** should have been made of solid gold, the womb that would bring for their children. It should have had gory reliefs to match the Assyrians’ walls, and the new gods’ idols guiding down the lightning.

Instead, Lily chose to copy Doctor Frankenstein’s methods in shabby precision, lest she make any errors that resulted in failure. Dorian wondered how afraid she was that her “children” would not revive, and how afraid that they would awaken flawed. It made little difference. Either way, it kept him from properly preparing the future godling’s crèche.

He distracted himself by studying how the method worked: chemicals, electricity, heat. Lily ignored his studies, preferring to go out seeking the candidate by criteria that were of little interest to him. She was seeking a whore, the lower and more wretched the better, but possessed of a spark of temperament. They did not want, she said, to raise to mastery one who would have preferred chains. Dorian asked her to find a beautiful one, by which he meant, one he could not keep from looking at. After so long on this Earth, he had learned to appreciate many forms of beauty, but never boredom.

He knew that Lily sought her offspring in the worst dens of iniquity that London could spawn: In cribs where glassy-eyed and diseased women took twenty clients in a day, in crevices between signs where the billboard girls swallowed seed for the price of a shot of whiskey, and even in the secret clubs where men paid to watch women of falling value dismembered in nightlong sessions. In between, she went shopping, purchasing clothes for girls of all shapes and sizes. After all, she said, they would be clothing every shape that held a cunt eventually. She bought extravagant ballgowns for tall women, corsets with thick and slender waists, pale children’s dresses for girls who had yet to blossom, and all the jewelry and toiletries to accompany the outfits for dozens of women.

It was just as well, thought Dorian, that his presence, quiet and obscure, haunted every major corporation and government entity in Europe. The tycoons and the ministers wondered at themselves as they spilled their secrets to the strange boy in the lonely house, but they kept spilling them just the same. They sent him information in their own uneven hands, on paper that reeked of cigar smoke and long-saved vintages; they sent great ships to port with products for the companies in which his aliases held interest. He even conversed, by letter, with a man he had identified as Mr. “Chandler”’s father. They discussed, of all things, the changes that Dorian expected in the prices of cattle hide over the next decade.

Dorian could have borrowed or bought or simply claimed any number of factory rooms to house their equipment, but the birth of a new race called for something more refined and precious than that. He rented a high, narrow building on a street populated by light industry and artisanal masters. When their offspring awakened, it would be between one of the queen’s favorite gem cutters and perhaps the finest miniature painter in the British Empire, an Indian who had somehow learned and improved on the techniques that Dorian had admired among the Persians centuries ago.

He had the resurrection house decorated in a style similar to that of his own mansion, both opulent and spare, yet with elements of church ritual to it. Of ordinary tin the tub might be, but it was still the sacrificial altar and their baptismal font. He had it embossed with entwined initials, _G_ and F, in tiny print, repeating five thousand times, and lay a selection of towels and robes on a table of pale wood beside it. Heavy drapes of white silk edged with cerise sheltered them from prying eyes, and, despite the ample gaslights, he brought in a hundred candles, in silver sticks and candelabra, that he placed at each corner of the tub, on the dressing table, and along the walls. A heavy silver mirror faced one end of the tub, and there were combs and balms and bottles of scent on the table. They’d have to pick which scent to use when the moment arrived.

It was, he thought, the most welcoming environment he could manage for their new offspring and soldier. He would have preferred different colors, if not the extravagance of pure gold then the warmth of rose gold, but Lily’s insistence on no added metals to the tub prevented such schemes. At least, he thought, it met his obligations for the event, although he had admittedly never read a relevant guide.

**The London** air was foul to breathe, and every day it seemed to carry more of the bloody scent of his Master’s magic; but cool upon his skin, making his fingers feel awake where they brushed the silver of his rings. He stepped out of the carriage first, then offered Lily a hand to climb down. She was dressed as a rich lady, nothing of the tart or the simple country girl showing in her attire, and he feigned obliviousness when she hesitated to take his hand, as though she were not used to such courtesies. For some reason, she made a scoffing expression when she took the lead. He ignored it as well.

She had made the contacts here; Dorian could have found the address, but it was her face that the watchman expected. He wondered if girl-murder drew much of a female crowd, the way rat-baiting did. If so, he might need to nod and smile at one or two of his fellow guests before killing them. For some reason, most of the men at ratting dens always smelled wrong, as though they wished to test the world’s patience by wearing bad cologne.

The bouncer didn’t bother addressing Lily, whether because murder houses were more prone than ratting dens to treating female clients poorly or because she had already demonstrated her fondness for semi-public homicide, Dorian didn’t ask.

“You are aware, sir, of the extremity?” the watchman asked. His face looked ruddy. Dorian thought he was nervous of getting caught— small wonder, considering the crime in question.

“Yes,” Dorian confirmed lightly.

“I mean, sir the illegality,” the red man continued, perhaps not finding Dorian’s face to meet his standards for accessories to murder. “I mean, sir, we butcher them.”

“I believe that’s what I am paying for,” Dorian responded. He took the money from his coat.

The man took it. “Well, I hope you have a memorable evening, sir.”

“I’m sure of it,” Dorian assured him, confident that this was true.

_God_ , he thought, repulsed, when he saw his fellow audience members. Apparently this was what happened to ratting aficionados when they passed their youth: All dressed alike, even more stiffly but with better cologne, at least, than their younger counterparts. There were no women besides Lily in the small circle, but no one ogled her. Dorian supposed they knew that any woman who chose to watch this was as dangerous as themselves. _If only they knew…_ But no, not for anything would he ruin this surprise.

Dorian could only assume that the heavy man in the center of the room wore a mask for dramatic purposes: It wasn’t as if anyone the proprietors expected to walk out of this room alive would be drawing pictures of it for the police. The implements involved seemed chosen for their symbolic value as well, brutish and unsubtle, designed to release the audience’s ferocity without any pretense of sophistication. Dorian wondered absently how old the spiked mace propped against the wall was.

The murder den was surprisingly well lit, and Dorian could see the night’s sacrifice— _“Justine,”_ Lily had told him, in a resonant voice— before she was quite in the room. She was small, brunette, and resisting with all her insignificant might, but that would become something very different when she had the strength of a demigod. He couldn’t guess her age: She combined a high, thin voice and soft face with breasts of medium size and a womanly spread of pubic hair. The tight curls grew a little higher on the sides than at the center, giving the impression of a heart, or perhaps a nascent devil’s head with its horns not yet finished growing.

The masked man undid her blindfold, revealing pale blue eyes with extraordinary spirit behind them. If she had suffered long at the hands of men, then he had to credit her for her will. As soon as the man quit forcing her neck to bend down, she tipped it up and spat at his face.

Dorian and Lily exchanged a look. Yes, this one had potential. Had there been other girls that Lily had watched penned here, who had not shown that they would die kicking and screaming, and that his partner had thus not bothered to save? He doubted he would ever find a way to ask.

The man struck the girl hard across the cheek, knocking her to the ground. When he reached for the whip on the wall, Lily twitched, and Dorian knew that the time had come.

He had brought a gun with him for efficiency’s sake, not that he needed a weapon to slaughter this crowd. After all, he had been studying the martial arts since before the word gymnasium existed for a place to practice them. But this was best done quickly, before any of his or Lily’s targets killed their candidate in a misguided attempt to stop them.

He fired five kill shots in rapid succession, reaching behind himself to break one man’s arm before putting an end to him. _Fish in a barrel is the modern expression, I believe._ Lily had only brought a small knife— he imagined that she wanted to wreak her vengeance in the closest and most personal manner possible—, but it didn’t matter. In terms of raw strength, she far exceeded Dorian, and she knew where every artery of the human body was located. She struck down man after man.

Dorian didn’t think it was an accident that she pierced the last of their fellow clients through the flesh beneath the chin, rather than the arteries beneath the neck, and let him dangle as she lifted him high. With no one else to interfere with their plans, she had time to make a dramatic gesture. Dorian pointed the gun at him and held it there, watching the man’s face and grinning before he fired his last shot.

Lily wiped her knife on her skirts and reached down to the girl, who trembled and shrank back, but held her gaze. Dorian wondered if the girl had decided that something even worse was happening, if she had been taken from the voyeurs only for a slower death at the hands of monsters. She wouldn’t be entirely wrong.

“Now,” Lily told the girl, touching her face, “you are mine.”

**Dorian draped** the girl in his coat and began searching the back rooms for her clothes. He found a shabby, dirty dress, short and unstructured like a child’s despite the fact that she was at least old enough to wear a corset; her youthful appearance would have appealed to a certain clientele. When he brought the dress to the exhibition room, Lily would have helped her into it, but the girl just snatched it away and yanked it down over her head. She shied away from the glass of water he brought her from the back, and said nothing when he asked if she needed to use the water closet before they were on their way.

They left before Dorian needed to offer any of the explanations that he had prepared for police drawn by the gunfire. The girl’s motions suggested that she had been bound and cramped for a long time, so they walked a few blocks before looking for a cab. Given that she seemed even more reluctant to touch Dorian than she was to touch Lily, they sat with Lily in the middle, the girl pressing hard against the walls of the carriage and gawking at Lily. What had started out as fear looked to be turning into fascination.

“Which house?” Dorian asked.

“Our home,” Lily answered. “She needs to rest.”

It occurred to Dorian that she would most efficaciously be refreshed by transformation into an immortal, a procedure that gave liveliness and health to even the dead, but he thought that Lily might have a reason that she didn’t want to say before the girl. There was sense in sharing their doctrine with Justine before they made her powerful, in giving her time to prepare for the decision they would offer her. So he gave the driver his home address and studied Lily and the girl in silence.

Lily seemed almost as taken with the girl as the girl was with her, watching her constantly, the smile on her lips combining the maternal with the sensual. She was nervous as well as pleased with their find, caught up in imagining the girl’s life story, past and future. Dorian could sense something of her whirl of thoughts: Snatches of time spent kneeling on dirty pavement and pushed up against hard bricks, an infant crying as Brona or Lily or the imagined girl walked down rickety stairs, man after man bruising her with palms and fists and thrusting cocks while they grunted and laughed and catcalled and—

He lightly pressed his hand under Lily’s, a concrete action that kept the whirlwind of thoughts from battering her and, perhaps, would calm her as well. She clasped his hand in return, just barely curling her fingers, but did not shift her attention away from her new student and her own pain.

**The girl** looked to Lily for approval before she accepted Dorian’s help climbing out of the carriage, but she did accept it, taking his hand and then, although she flinched, letting him steady her with another hand to the shoulder. She was weak; God only knew how long it had been since she had eaten, perhaps not since the club had bought or kidnapped her. He released her once she stood more or less steadily on the ground, and Lily guided her in the door.

The girl’s eyes went even wider when she saw the interior of the house. “Do you like it here?” Dorian asked her. “I bought the whole building from a duke who gambled too much. More than enough room for you to do what you like. There’s a suite waiting for you. You can have a whole wing, if you like.”

She still didn’t answer, so Dorian continued. “We have some things for you upstairs, clothes and a bed and such. You can take a bath first, if you like, or would you prefer to get straight to the kitchen? I don’t keep staff for it at night, but the bread and fruit are fresh.”

“Come, child,” Lily told her. “I’ll take you to get some food. Men starve the women who serve too many of them.”

Dorian recognized why Lily might think the girl didn’t want a man around. On the other hand, it was still his house and his kitchen.

He followed politely, never getting closer than arm’s length, as Lily drew the girl down the halls and into the kitchen. As fascinated as the girl was by Lily, she seemed even more entranced by the food. He thought of asking how long it had been since she’d eaten, but he didn’t want to point out that he’d noticed her gawking.

Lily handed her a slice of bread and moved to fill a plate while Dorian poured a glass of water. The girl crammed the bread into her mouth in one bite, stuffing it so full she could barely close her lips. That must have left her dry as a desert, but she still wouldn’t take the glass from Dorian’s hand. He had to sit it on the table before she would snatch it up. She drained it in a few seconds.

“I think we should be introduced,” Dorian said, as though this were all as new to him as it was to her. “My name is Dorian Gray, and this—“ he gestured toward Lily— “is Miss Lily Frankenstein, my partner in all things. May we have the honor of knowing your name?”

She looked at Lily, who gave her a little smile. The girl grabbed a handful of late strawberries off the plate and began eating them. At least she waited until she had swallowed to speak. “Justine,” she said, directing the answer to Lily. The girl’s voice was shrill and uneven in quality, yet she wielded it like a cudgel, as if she wanted to get in a blow before anyone else could.

Dorian set the refilled glass on the table. “I’m not sure we should give her much more food just yet. We don’t want to make her sick.”

“True,” Lily agreed. “Here, Justine, one more slice, and then we’ll show you the upstairs.” She glanced at Dorian. “Will you go find her something to wear, darling? Something she can sleep in?”

“I’ll leave it in her washroom,” he agreed.

“How is our recruit?” Dorian asked Lily, when she returned downstairs.

“Cleaner than she was. Not as hungry. She didn’t say another word, and I think she fell asleep before I could pull the blanket over her.”

“She’s angry,” Dorian said.

“She should be,” Lily replied. “That anger will give her a strength beyond the storm that animates her. It will make her a true warrior in our cause.”

Dorian handed her one of the champagne flutes he held. “We should toast, should we not?”

Lily picked up the other flute, but she didn’t offer any wishes, so Dorian took the initiative. “To a new world,” he declared.

Lily lifted her glass in agreement, but her expression was bittersweet, and Dorian wondered why, on the cusp of creating the new world of which she had dreamed, a piece of her heart still clung to the old one.

**They were** waltzing when Justine came down the stairs some thirteen hours later. By chance, they had on the same cylinder that had been playing during Doctor Frankenstein’s rude yet entertaining intrusion.

Justine, however, was an invited guest. For her, they stopped their dancing.

“Ah, you’re up!” Dorian told her, in the friendliest manner possible. It didn’t keep Justine from staying well back near the doorway, but he didn’t fault her. He turned off the cylinder and returned to Lily, taking her hand to present a united image, not to mention because he simply liked holding the hand of someone who could appreciate his peculiar situation. Justine paid him no mind throughout, her wide eyes gazing raptly at Lily. It was the look of a worshipper who could not decide if her prayers had summoned a god or a devil, and had not yet learned that there was no difference. “We thought it best to let you sleep in.”

“You must be hungry,” Lily said, with a nervous rasp in her voice. “Please sit down.”

“No,” Justine snapped, flat and shrill. “I’ll stand.” Dorian thought respectfully that Lily had indeed found a candidate less boring than most.

“Welcome to your new home, Justine,” Lily said, “if you’ll do us that courtesy.”

“You killed them,” Justine said. Dorian couldn’t tell if she was appalled by it, or only intrigued, but she was fascinated.

“And would have killed more,” Dorian agreed.

“And shall,” Lily said.

Justine considered that. “Why?”

Lily let go of Dorian’s hand and slowly advanced on Justine. The girl held her ground. “This room,” Lily said, circling the girl. “The opulence dazzles you, as it did me when I stood there, a feral animal,”— _Oh yes,_ Dorian remembered that, and he still saw the animal in the way that Lily perhaps unknowingly stalked the girl— “raised on the streets, forced to my knees when I was a girl, servicing any man with two bob and a hard back to his hand.” Justine kept her face at a proud tilt, but her expression softened. Lily continued, “And there I would have stayed and there I would have died, but… for a strange working of fate.”

“Will you do the same?” asked Dorian.

“Yes,” Justine said, without hesitation. Though she answered him, her eyes were focused, dazzled, at Lily. Well, service to one of them would be service to both.

“No matter the cost?”

“Beggar the cost.”

Lily’s voice dropped, on a velvety tone. “And the men who used you, the monsters, will you forgive them?”

Justine did hesitate then, just slightly. “Would you have me forgive them?” she said. For the first time, she sounded unsure of herself, rather than just of everyone else in the world.

“No, no,” Lily murmured. She took Justine’s face in her hands. “We shall have, my dear, a _monumental_ revenge.” She pressed her lips to Justine’s, and the girl allowed it. Dorian sensed no feeling of contradiction from Lily, no suggestion that using her for sex themselves made her think of the men from her past. This was good, he thought: They would have a true communion with their followers, rather than the manipulations and farces of the old faiths; passions and joys and oneness of flesh and purpose and worth, such as they could never have with mortals.

Was that love, already, in the girl’s eyes, as she stared at Lily? Dorian thought that it was. Had he ever loved so quickly? What would come of it as eternity passed?

Not wanting to overplay his hand, he didn’t attempt to kiss her himself yet. Lily could finish any remaining work in earning the girl’s loyalties and affection. As for Dorian, he had an idea in mind for a ceremony to cement those ties for all time.

He smiled at both of the women as he left, a little more of a smile for Lily than for Justine. “Later, my dear? I have something in mind for our new friend. The perfect present, if I can find it.”

“Very well,” Lily said, still beaming at her new lover. “I’ll be instructing Justine in our philosophy.” Dorian didn’t think that was a joke, although their “philosophy”— that the sexes were equal, while mortals and immortals were not— seemed a rather simple one to him.

**Dorian** had gotten used to the fact that his “Master”’s minions would appear in his existence from time to time to torment him with their very nature, but of late it seemed that they would overrun London. While they did not practice spells in the way the other Master’s witches did, they still reeked of magic. It frightened him, in a way that nothing new ever could; it repulsed him; and, worst of all, it enticed him. He saw none of the more elusive fanged creatures that always lurked somewhere near the nests of contaminated humans, controlling them, but then, that was the nature of elusive creatures, was it not?

He had long since accepted that there was little point in killing his creator’s pathetic minions. It might save a few lives; long ago, he recalled, it had sated his spite; but the truth was that he no longer cared who they killed, and he had drained his cup of vengeance a long time ago. He wondered how he would react were he to find the “Master” himself. Would Dorian confront him with the power of three thousand years’ fury? Or would it, as he feared, just be one more day, one more monster so like himself that he felt not even curiosity? If Lily’s scheme worked as planned, the meeting would eventually happen, for they could not reign undisturbed over the Earth while another god claimed their domain.

That was a matter for the coming centuries, and one best dealt with once they commanded an army. To that end, he sought Justine’s present.

“Fat Andy,” as Justine’s pimp was apparently known, didn’t always sell seats to murder scenes. Instead, he kept two or three girls at a time in a dark basement that muffled their cries, and brought them out at night to the first floor, where they performed their sexual services in full view of each other and any waiting patrons. There were even three little platforms to give those watching a better view.

Dorian arrived as the women were being wrangled upstairs for the evening. A small crowd had assembled: Mostly sailors and immigrants, too poor to pay for a night or even a quarter hour alone with a woman. They catcalled and cheered and made lewd remarks about one woman’s stretch-marked breasts and another’s protruding labia. Neither of the women had anything like Justine’s fighting spirit, and Dorian wondered if that courage were a qualification for being sent to the murder house.

Neither the pitiful women nor the repulsive patrons were his concern tonight. He had come here for one man, and nothing else.

“Fat Andy” smacked the third woman on her rear and left her on her platform, inciting more noise from the crowd, and collapsed on a battered chaise. He picked up a bottle of cheap whiskey from the floor and took a deep draught, belched, and began drinking again.

Dorian approached him slowly, a benign smile on his face. “Hello,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced before. My name is Dorian Gray, and I believe you are… Andy something, forgive me, I don’t remember the last?”

“Andy Miller,” the man said. His eyes went wide, as though he were surprised that he had shared this information.

“Mr. Miller,” acknowledged Dorian. “A very respectable name. I believe we have an acquaintance in common. A young lady named… Justine?”

The man started. “Justine?” He coughed. “I don’t have her anymore.”

“Of course not. But you will be pleased, I’m sure, to learn that the young lady is thriving and well. Do you think she misses you?”

Andy looked confused. “She was…”

“In this very establishment, on the night that several of its clients died by violence. I know. Were you concerned for her?”

The man was starting to panic. “I didn’t do anything!”

“To those men? I know that, because… I did.” With one hand, he grabbed the scruff of Andy’s neck and yanked him to his feet; with the other, he withdrew a pistol. He pitched his voice to the crowd. “If anyone else wants to know what it is like to be a patron of the illustrious Justine, I have five extra bullets. Otherwise, I recommend that you remain quiet and still until we are gone.”

Andy fought, but not with thousands of years of experience and perfect confidence in his own indestructibility. Dorian doubted the man had ever won a fight in the schoolyard, let alone one with a hardened immortal. He produced a rag from his waistcoat and tied it in the man’s mouth, then dragged him through the door and into the rented coach with its silent rented drivers.

Dorian made sure the curtains were shut before rattling off his address to the driver. Let them share the information with burglars if they wanted; he knew more dangerous predators. Pleased by their work, he tipped them extra, and was rewarded when they offered to help him move the scruffy man into the back of the house.

**They left** him sprawled on the floor of a little-used interior room in a wing of the house that only perfectionism and vanity kept Dorian from shutting off and abandoning to the spiders and dust. Only the cleaning crew came here, every Monday; in the past year none of Dorian’s caterers or guests had had need of it, although Dorian would not have been surprised to learn that Lily had explored it. It occurred to Dorian that it might be convenient if he had already designated some underground or unremarkable building as an oubliette, but he had tried that in the past and found that it was usually less convenient than simply maintaining the locks in his house.

**If Justine** liked her present as well as Lily did, then Dorian would count his time well spent. He told her Andy’s history, and she Lily approached the man with shining eyes, in contrast to the man’s dull and frightened stare. “We can use him,” she said, her pale cheeks flushing, and he wondered if she meant only for strategy. Dorian knew that the finger she traced slowly down the man’s face to his neck was cool, but that her eyes would be burning, devouring and pitiless like the altars of Tanit. He wondered, for a moment, if she intended to fuck the man— whether through some miracle of responsiveness, or with a piece of ancient cutlery or weapon craft, he couldn’t guess.

The moment passed and she stood back. “Such power we hold, when we only acknowledge we hold it,” she murmured. There were tears in her eyes, and, though she held her face high, her upper lip trembled.

“We will overpower them all,” Dorian said, not quite sure to whom he referred by “all.” He kissed her, very lightly, on her trembling mouth, and she kissed him back. Her mouth was clean, warm from the tea she had recently drunk, but the memory of the bloody magic he kept sensing in the city filled him with its taste, and he hungered for a passion to replace it.

They made love on the other side of the room from the stench of the man, but Lily watched their victim throughout the act. The murder in her eyes matched the power of her hands, but while Dorian merely bruised, he imagined that the man would wind up bleeding out, his life reduced to nothing more than a metallic scent and scarlet paint. If Justine, for some reason, spared the man, Lily would certainly end him.

“Do you think this will earn her loyalty?” asked Dorian, once they were finished.

Lily stood. She never wanted to stay in bed, or wherever else they might have coupled, long afterward. “It will be her test. If her hatred does not give her the strength to kill, then she cannot be one of us.”

“It will be a beautiful ritual,” Dorian assured her. He would light the candles and polish the perfect knife. Would they want incense? No, he thought, they would want nothing to weaken the scent of blood. _The blood, the blood that he smelled everywhere…_ A younger man would have shaken his head to rid himself of his fancies. Dorian had learned to embrace the respite from reality. What he sensed everywhere in London, 1893, might feel like blood, but it was something far more dangerous, far more loathsome.

Far more like himself.

“One in which she will delight,” said Lily.

“The perfect moment to be welcomed into our secrets,” Dorian replied. He thought longingly of the bath in the resurrection house, the mirrors and candles and bottles of fragrance, the towels and robes. What would it be like, to be guided into immortality in such choice and comfort? But Lily was right: Even Justine’s intent called for a ceremony of initiation.

To be right, she was strangely quiet, even sad as the gloating melted away. Dorian couldn’t put his finger on why.

“When should we ask her, do you think?” Dorian asked.

“Tomorrow. I suppose this evening, now.” She didn’t hesitate, but her smile was more wistful than joyous.

“Very well,” Dorian replied. “I’m sure that our Mr. Miller can keep himself company in the meantime.”

**Dorian** turned the knife with its heavy silver hilt over, letting the light show its workmanship, and gently rubbing away the beginnings of tarnish with a soft cloth. He had yet to find an occasion to solemn for fine crafting.

“In the dark ages,” he began, “in certain parts of Europe, it was common for novitiate nuns to pledge themselves to God in blood. They would cut off their own breasts and make them an offering to the Almighty. Much as soldiers in ancient Rome would have to prove themselves by killing an enemy soldier. You were not a legionnaire, unless painted in blood.” He took in Justine’s tension, the way she her muscles pulled taut as if racked when she looked at the man bound in the chair before her. Yes, he thought she would kill.

“We’re all tested, in one way or another, are we not?” Dorian continued. “Do you know this man?”

“He bought me when I was twelve,” she said. Again their was a disconnect between the sharp quality of her voice, and her flat and hard delivery.

“And then?” Dorian prompted.

“He used me as his pet whore for a time, like a monkey on a chain. When I got older he grew tired of me and whored me out. Set me up on a platform, let them fuck me ten at a time. Sold me to the sailors and the chinks and the Laskers finally.”

Behind her, Lily looked close to weeping, yet she was also enjoying this. There was power in this revealing of truths, and Dorian knew that she savored the taste _like blood._

“And then,” Dorian finished, “he charged us twenty pounds to watch you tortured and killed. That’s… twenty pounds total, mind you,” he added, as if clearing up some minor but pesky clerical detail. “Ten pounds each.”

“That is your worth,” Lily informed the girl.

Dorian approached Justine slowly, holding the knife before him.

“Know what you do, Justine,” Lily warned her. “Such a thing is a pledge. It can never be drawn back.”

“You can never be innocent again,” added Dorian. His heart beat faster and faster. It was a strange and extraordinary feeling, to offer such a choice as a gift. “God will turn his back on you.”

“Mankind will shun you.”

“Murderess.”

“Whore,” Lily said.

That word catalyzed something inside Justine— anger and wounded pride, Dorian supposed— that “murderess” had not. Without speaking another syllable to her patrons, she took the knife in hand, strode to Fat Andy, and slit his throat, through the arteries and into the trachea. Blood poured out, air whistling through the gash as he tried to breathe, and then he slumped forward, limp.

Justine wasn’t finished. She stabbed him in the chest, again and again, flinging blood through the air and onto her face. It was beautiful, a passion, the blood and the fury lending rich red color to a gray world and bringing new life to immortal flesh. And she had taken their offer; she was united with them; they would all live in their red shining world together, for eternity.

He moved toward her, slowly, astounded by the tenderness of her pain and rage in the way he never quite learned to not be astonished by the tenderness of a flower’s petals. She had that quality, that potential, in a way that reminded him of the spring blossom that precedes the berry. When he gently tilted her face to his, taking in the sight of the blood she had drawn, she stared back at him as though in a kind of wonder herself.

He kissed her, more passionately when she returned the gesture. She jumped a little into the air; he caught her in his hands and let her latch her small legs around him. She was such a little thing, such a small, frail creature in so many ways, yet prepared to become one of the greatest forces this world had ever known.

Lily rose from the chair to join them, and Dorian slid to the floor with Justine in his lap. Lily knelt above them and kissed the girl, ran her fingers down her face and neck and the upper edge of her bodice before ripping the gown’s closures loose. She tore through her underthings, even the heavy corset laces, as if through the most fragile lace, while Justine, with less strength but an eager spirit, tore apart Dorian’s shirt. He lifted her out of his lap, then, with another kiss, to pull off his shoes and socks, but Justine pulled down his trousers. She lacked grace and skill in this, having perhaps never pursued it with anyone she cared to impress. It made no difference, once she reached out her hand and began smearing it on him, painting him, surrounding him in the rich scent and licking it from his face almost as quickly as she could reapply it.

He turned to the blood as well, as did Lily. It seemed there would never be enough blood in the world to sate their hunger, never enough violence to leave them in peace. They took it by the handful, touched it to crevices with fingertips, tasted it on one another’s flesh and whimpered. When Dorian, his head cradled against Lily’s stomach, tried to guide Justine back onto his lap, she pulled away for more blood.

“I want to go to my bed!” she panted. “I want his blood to be mine.”

So they went upstairs to Justine’s bed. Between the dark wood of the headboard and footboard, they made the white sheets bloom red and fragrant, writhing against one another anarchically. It hardly made any difference whom one touched, as long as they could feel that pressure. _Everyone who matters in the world is in this bed._

Eventually, their frantic need subsided, wrung out of them _like blood from sheets_ ; Dorian wondered if he was the one to have that thought, or if he caught it from one of the others. They sat in their nest of vibrant death and talked of their plans.

“To build an empire,” said Lily, “you start with a single soldier.”

“Or a religion, with a single worshipper,” said Dorian. He reached for Justine’s hand; the girl twined her fingers with his, but her eyes were all for Lily.

“And which are we?” she asked.

“You are our first, Justine,” Lily told her. “There will be more. You shall help us find them and bring them to our great enterprise. An army we’ll build.”

“Whores, and fallen women,” Dorian added.

“The disgraced and the powerless,” said Lily.

“The shunned and the hated,” said Dorian.

“All those… invisible women who move unseen through this great city,” said Lily: “Our soldiers.”

“And then?” asked Justine.

“Power,” said Dorian.

“No man’s pet,” said Lily.

“Revolution,” said Dorian.

“Freedom,” said Lily. She kissed Justine, deeply and tenderly, but when she spoke, her voice was hard. “Liberty is a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses.”

**He had** expected that Lily would broach the topic of immortality with Justine as soon as their love and Lily’s pupil had passed their initiation, but she did not. As far as Dorian could tell, Lily was informing her only of some dull scheme for women’s emancipation, not for their transformation into a new race. He wondered what on Earth she could be thinking. For Lily _was,_ like him, a creature of this world, where both had been forged and both soared above their fellows; she was not waiting for some prophesied moment or preordained end. They could remake the world as they pleased now. Why wait through more months or years or millennia of suffocating humanity?

Of course, humanity wasn’t the only mass of consciousness he sensed in London. He didn’t sense his maker’s presence— he didn’t know _if_ he could sense his maker’s presence—, but the pathetic altered ones were everywhere, frightened and ravenous. After so much time, the idea that the “Master” would finally move to change the order of the world, and and do it at the exact time that Dorian and Lily strove to do the same, felt absurd. It also felt horrifying and exhilarating. To face that terrible strength with a new strength just as great, to defeat a god, to become like the heroes in the old tales at which he had grown, in his sophistication and cynicism, to laugh: What more could he achieve?

In the back of his mind, he knew he was a coward, who hoped and expected that the old one’s schemes would never get that far. There was one thing left, besides boredom, that still filled him with fear, and he was grateful that, if his manuscripts were correct, it had to seduce Vanessa Ives to its bidding. Whatever the “Master”’s powers, Dorian’s experiences in Tyrens had not led him to believe that the creator possessed greater charm than the creation, _the invention, the toy._ He could imagine what it would feel like to be courageous, but he couldn’t quite imagine himself having courage.

And if it came to it, would he fight the Master? Yes, he would, he knew, just as certainly as he knew that he was a coward. He would fight, because an eternity of inanity, of wasting his potential living as a human, frightened him more than torture or death. _“Power.” “Revolution.” “Freedom.”_

Regardless, he grew aware that more and more, Lily wasted her time with Justine, still a mortal, still unable to understand what they experienced. It unsettled him, seeing Lily lower herself so foolishly. What was Justine, without their intervention? What was she, without immortality? _A child, a girl, a daughter to watch grow,_ but Lily’s children would count their growth in conquest, not in meaningless years. This was not what they had promised Justine, whether or not she had understood it; it was not what they had promised one another, either, and he found it unbearable that either of them would choose to cheat the both of them out of their happiness, just when they were on the cusp of achieving it.

“Do you not think it time that we show Justine her new room?” asked Dorian, posed on the chaise in the gallery. Incurably sober or not, he dangled a flute of champagne high over the chaise’s arm, where it would best catch the candlelight.

“Is that what we call it?” asked Lily, her voice bitter. “The womb from which she will be reborn in the image that we desire?”

“In the image that she desires as well,” he amended. “An immortal one, perfect, unchanging, eternal. Powerful.”

“She isn’t ready,” Lily said. “She’s just a child.”

Dorian offered a faint shrug. “They all are. What does it matter, fifteen or a hundred and five— it’s nothing compared to eternity. We could wait until she lies on her death bed, surrounded by her great-grandchildren, and still she would be a child.”

“Am I a child?” asked Lily. Dorian was no longer surprised by her bitterness, but he almost started at her curiosity.

_“Possibly,”_ he wanted to say, in light of her petty and short-sighted tantrums, but he held it back. “I don’t think gods get to be children.”

“Then we must give her a chance,” she said, “just a moment, to be a child.”

From somewhere, from nowhere, came flashes of a different, red-headed girl: Crying in a cradle, picking flowers, getting married. Brona’s memories? Brona’s hopes? And always bleeding through those flashes— or was it the other way around— was Justine, not wielding her knife like the angel of death, but smiling as sweetly as any church cherub, gazing with adoration into the face of her one and only savior.

**“You cut** them here,” said Lily, gesturing with her knife across the front of Dorian’s throat. Justine watched with the rest of the whores, recruits who had no idea of the enterprise they might have been part of, had not their idol become so distracted. Dorian wondered when she would refocus. But at least her games with the knife were mildly diverting, and, though the fire in her eyes guttered and weaved, it did not go out.

“If you do it right,” she said, “their blood will paint the walls. You’ll have long enough to see it in their eyes,” she continued, looking deep into his, “The shock, the horror.” He ran an appreciative hand from her cheekbone to her breast, feeling the subtle shifts of a living— strangely, yes, but living— body reverberating in his rings, before she pounced on him and he let her. “Push the blade in here,” she pressed its tip ever so lightly into the hollow of his throat. “When they try to scream, blood will come pouring out of their mouths. And if they push you to your knees…,” she knelt, and he could feel her letting her mouth open almost enough to have taken him inside as she pressed close to his groin, _“…here.”_ She mimed an upward strike with the knife, then swept it far to the side out of pure delight in the thought. Though there was nothing for it to strike against, and he knew it was made too well to rattle, he swore he could hear the metal ring. Perhaps it was what she heard, the sound of battle and vengeance.

She stood, kissing him— an absurd peck that made him think of nothing so much as the word _“wifely”_ —, and turned to the crowd. “We are not women who crawl,” she said, “or women who kneel. For this, we will be branded revolutionaries. Women who are strong, and refuse to be degraded, and choose to protect themselves, are called monsters. That is the world’s crime, not ours.” She held out the knife. “Who wishes to try?”

Justine all but sprang at the blade. “I shan’t go easy on you,” Dorian warned her.

“Then you’ll play the part of a john well,” she answered. It might have been a snarl, but she was a feral house cat next to Lily’s lioness, and, neither was yet anything to Dorian Gray. The thought surprised him. Surely, he and Lily were partners in a great scheme, one of vision and substance, not a lackluster uprising of ill-bred peasants or an airy imagining bandied between self-congratulating professors. But he saw nothing of vision or significance in the scene around him, nothing except in Lily’s own existence.

Justine had a much smaller perspective, and an ax to grind. He wondered if Lily’s presence made her resistant to his charm. Certainly, no human in millennia of existence had loathed him with so great fervor and little reason. It would have made her quite interesting, had he thought it innate to her.

“I suppose you’ve had a lot of practice?” she asked, and her voice was as sweet and deadly as arsenic— a poison to which Dorian was notably immune. “How many women have you paid to debase? Treat me as you would them. Fuck me, you filth. Beat me, you cunt. Photograph me while you do it so you can pleasure yourself after.” She pushed the knife to his throat and drew it across the surface of his skin with lingering pleasure.

Dorian supposed that he now had a better understanding of what Lily and Justine spent their time talking about, since they weren’t discussing the plan he’d agreed to. He wondered if he should be glad that Lily had refused to trade the details of her creation for those of his. She certainly wouldn’t have hesitated to share them with Justine, although it seemed she wasn’t above adding embellishments.

“Well done, Justine! Who’s next?” Lily tried to interrupt her pupil’s self-destruction, to no avail. As the end of the knife almost left Dorian’s throat, the girl pushed it in harder, drawing a drop of blood.

“You’re pushing your luck, my dear,” Dorian cautioned.

“Am I, now?” asked Justine. She glanced at Lily. “Would you like to see him drown on his own blood?”

Lily hesitated, just a little, but at just the wrong time. “Well, then who would the others practice on?” She took the knife from Dorian’s hand and offered it to the next student, leaving Dorian and Justine staring at each other while the blood trickled down Dorian’s throat.

**The sound** of a waltz drew him to the gallery. Lily’s flock of whores was gathered, some consuming opium or liquor, some appearing stupefied by nothing more than the mildly transgressive scene before them.

Lily and Justine were dancing, Lily leading confidently in her great bustle gown, Justine following, dressed half as a man and half as a child playing princess. Her hair was up, decorated with a barrette fashioned to resemble a tiara, and she wore trousers, a coat, and a waistcoat, all fitted to her, with no shirt.

“May I cut in?” Dorian asked Lily.

Lily’s eyeballs barely shifted his direction. “You can have the next one, darling.”

Dorian flicked the gramophone to silence. “Could we have a moment alone?”

The women filed out, Justine giving Lily a glance that he supposed was meant to indicate she’d be nearby if needed. Perhaps she imagined herself not so much a princess as a knight to her queen. She didn’t know that her queen was protecting her like the king and keeping her less than a pawn.

“I fear that Justine does not know her place,” Dorian warned Lily.

Lily’s eyes held a challenge, although he suspected she thought she’d hidden it. “She says the same about you.”

“My place is at your side,” Dorian reminded her. “We are equals, partners. _Immortals._ What is she to stand alongside me?”

“She has the heart of who I was,” Lily said, her eyes beginning to brim, her voice shaking. “She has the very soul of who I was before I was this. She has the anger, and the hate, and the loss.” Despite the tears in her eyes, she licked her lips, as if savoring the anguish of her own memories.

“And are you no more than that?”

“Some times that is all I am,” and challenge or no, she turned away from him to pace the floor, her heels clicking on the marble. She, too, wore a crownlike decoration in the back of her hair, although on her it looked unnecessary, rather than ludicrous. “I remember every man who ever used me. Every filthy alley, every cruel bastard who hurt me and bent me to submission. All of Brona’s shame and debasement, and everything she lost along the way.” She turned back to him. “That is something you cannot know, Dorian.”

He didn’t argue. “But they can?”

Lily shrugged. “It is who they are.”

“Then let us be someone else,” he said, drawing close. He made to touch her neck, but she had covered it in a heavy choker. She embraced his face, as she had the young doctor’s, her hands on either side while she smiled up at him.

“Fantasies,” she said.

“It is our world to make.”

“And we shall,” she promised. “But I’m committed to them now, you understand that?”

And that commitment and all those girls came far ahead of Dorian now. They had set out together on a path to glory, and somehow, somewhere, she had wandered off into the dirty alleys that filled her memory. When had it happened? When she pronounced Justine hers? When she invited the others into their home? When she looked into the girl’s eyes as all three of them made love in the sticky-sweet haze of blood and touch and hope?

It didn’t matter now. She was lost, the haze dissipated. Dorian was clear-headed and himself and alone as ever.

“There’s so little I understand…. I understand this,” he acknowledged, and kissed her. For him it was a farewell, but she had so lost interest in him that she could not see it.

“And this,” she said, in her low, seductive voice. She gave him another kiss, then pulled him close for a hug. Once, he would have been pleased, perhaps even pathetically flattered, by the trust it showed. Now, he thought that she did it because she assumed, as a man under her wiles, he was simple enough to be trusted: His great quality was that he was _there_ for her, not as a partner, but more like a comfortable pillow.

“If only this were true, Dorian,” she murmured. “If only this were all.”

Because he had already bidden her his farewell, he did not ask her why she thought this was not true, or why anything else mattered. He simply held her in quiet comfort while his mind raced through the best ways to get rid of her. Poison? He couldn’t think of any strong enough. Decapitation? It had failed on him. Gunshots? Perhaps one straight to the brain.

Justine interrupted, an answer in her wake. “Excuse the interruption,” she said, “but it seems we have a visitor.”

Dorian had not suspected Doctor Frankenstein of excessive common sense, but neither had he anticipated the absurdity of what he hesitated to denote as the doctor’s latest “plan.” Having realized that his skills as a sharpshooter were inadequate to the task, young Victor had seemingly decided to try his luck with nothing but his bare hands, and, as a result, was being effortlessly manhandled by two knife-wielding strumpets in Justine’s wake. It made for a ludicrous tableau, albeit one that might well work to Dorian’s advantage. After all, a brilliant fool was still brilliant, and far easier to manipulate than a sane one.

The strumpets wrestled— well, shoved— Victor Frankenstein onto his knees in front of Justine, who held a knife at his throat, while Lily and even Dorian watched in bafflement.

Finally, Lily laughed. “This has to be the worst kidnapping in the annals of crime,” she declared, and Dorian briefly thought back over his millennia of existence before mentally conceding that, if a kidnapping were all this was, then Lily was right.

“May I?”asked Justine, her knife pressed under the doctor’s chin. It wasn’t where Lily had shown the girls to strike, but Dorian doubted it would take much to kill Victor..

“No,” ordered Dorian. It was just possible that Doctor Frankenstein had something up his sleeve, something he could use.

_“May I?”_ Justine repeated pointedly, looking to Lily.

“Not yet,” Lily answered. She wrung her hands, more from indecision or exasperation than fury or grief, Dorian thought.

“Did you really intend to kidnap her?” asked Dorian. He didn’t bother to conceal his incredulity. It seemed appropriate to the persona both Lily and the young doctor were used to.

“I intended,” Victor said, with admirable steadiness if not wisdom, “to heal her.”

“But I’m not ill, Victor,” Lily pointed out. “I’m preternaturally healthy, as well you know.”

“I have developed a serum,” he explained, “a medicine of sorts. I can take all your anger and pain and make it go away. I can make you whole again, human, unblemished by sadness.”

“My sadness is my own,” she declared. “I would never give it up.”

“I can make you who you were.”

“And you think that would be a kindness? I have suffered long and hard to be who I am. I want my scars to show.”

“We were happy,” Victor said. His pale eyes watered, and Dorian could sense that, springing though they did from the well of selfish delusion, the tears were real.

“No, Victor, you were happy. I was just waiting, for all of this.”

Justine’s ability to mimic stability was wearing through. She turned her attention back to her knife. “You seek to violate us and call it a kindness!” she hissed. “Let me kill him!”

“No!” protested Dorian, although, he had to admit, from Lily or Justine’s perspective, it would indeed be wisest.

_“I don’t. Take orders. From any man!”_ Justine shouted.

“It’s senseless to murder him,” Dorian argued. “For what? Loving you? Being foolish?” He wondered if Lily had truly wandered so far into her obsession with the girls that she would not remember their conversation in this very room when Victor had shot them both. _“Shall I murder him now?” “Entirely up to you, darling.”_

“Being a man!” Justine spat. “Let me do it!”

“Lily…,” Dorian said, trying to sound gentle in the midst of the maelstrom, “…no.”

For a moment, anything could have happened. It wasn’t very long, but the plans that made up eternity hinged on it.

“No,” Lily said, to which Justine promptly released the doctor, who continued to kneel, stupefied, on Dorian’s parlor floor. “I suppose I’m sentimental about this one. Besides, you never know when we might find ourselves in need of his unique services.” She knelt, pressing Victor’s face to her breasts. “Heed my words, boy. Heal your broken heart elsewhere. Mend your heart with another. I am done with you. The next time I see you, I’ll hold the razor myself.”

She let him go. Despite already kneeling, Victor managed to stagger, dazed and glassy-eyed. Dorian entertained the idea of asking him to stay a while: The man clearly had something in common with the opium-smoking whores who watched them.

Instead, he approached Victor. “I’ll see to it that our guest leaves the house,” he said, and extended a hand. Victor refused to take it, choosing instead to scramble to his feet in an ungainly fashion. Dorian reset the cylinder as the exited the parlor.

At the front door, Dorian hesitated, blocking Victor’s way with an arm.

“What are you waiting on, my gratitude?” Victor asked, his voice bitter.

Dorian supposed that Victor was, in his sullen, graceless way, correct. “You are in my debt, Victor. I will call on it.” With that, he let the doctor go, but lingered for a moment himself, wondering if it were possible for him to always lose these games by chance, or if some cruel blind spot caused him always to make a false move.

**Each afternoon** brought a soirée. The caterers of London must be exhausted. Dorian couldn’t imagine why Lily bothered to throw these parties for her girls, events indistinguishable from so many thousands of others except, perhaps, for the less-decorous laughter and less tasteful use of rouge. Dorian had seen eras in which the respectable men layered on more cosmetics than these tarts kept in their boudoirs; he could have given them advice; but, like everything else to do with Lily’s potential, never-quite immortals, the idea felt pointless.

Certainly, the speeches weren’t a difference. They might contain a few different words; they might come from a woman’s throat; but he could have found the same hollow outrage at any Marxist underground, the same squandering of breath in any politician’s parlor. God, he was disappointed.

And yet there were moments when her potential magnificence broke through, when the door that she had inexplicably erected between herself and her true greatness opened a crack. As an afternoon of pointless drinking and smoking and rustling about in silks turned into an evening of pointless drinking and smoking and rustling about in silks, Lily rang a knife against her champagne glass, bringing the indecorous laughter to a sudden, reverent halt. It seemed there was some understanding regarding tonight’s speech, for Justine immediately stood to “help” Lily onto the table in a knightly fashion, kissing her hand for good measure, before sitting down again.

“There’s an old tale, from Ireland, where I once lived,” Lily began, standing on the table as though it were the grandest and most fitting stage in all the world. Dorian had to approve of her lack of self-consciousness. “They have there an ancient tradition of keening. The old women would gather together and sing the most poignant, beautiful lamentations. It’s a way to sing the soul to a better place: A place of divine peace, or rapture even.

“But several years ago, the old _men_ of the Catholic Church decided they did not ‘approve’ of this pagan practice, as it circumvented their rituals. So they convinced the court to arrest these good, true women and put them on trial.” She tittered. “Of course, they were found guilty and sentenced to death. So the women were led to the gallows, all in a row, and as the ropes were tightened around their necks, they began to keen. And as they fell, and as their necks snapped, their song echoed for a moment, sounding their way to immortality.” She stopped, close to and facing Dorian, the only other person in the room who could truly know what immortality meant.

At the very least, Dorian thought, it was an appropriate way to end a story told in the home of two immortals. If he were to fall into ludicrous optimism, it might even herald her acknowledgment of the bond the immortals shared. He lifted his glass to toast her speech—

—And she swiped it, unthinking, from his hand, as though he had merely been a server passing by. 

She swirled away from him in her billowing skirts bought with their money, and echoed the motion by whirling the champagne around in its glass. He doubted she could become drunk on spirits as gentle as those he had seen her imbibe, but she was surely drunk on her delusions, her grief, the dregs of Brona’s memories.

“My doomed, keening women,” she continued, “shall we be immortal? Shall we sing from the gallows, too? We must have the faith of those women. We must have their strength and commitment. We must be _bloody or nothing else!”_ She handed the glass to one of the women and crouched down, her voice assuming a confidential tone. “And now you must prove your commitment to our great cause. Go now, every one of you, and _rise up!”_ She pounded the table with her words. _“Rise! Up!_ Go into those foul alleys and secret back lanes you know so well, and find me a bad man! A faithless husband, a cruel lover, a rich despot, a scrofulous john fucking some girl just like you and quick with the back of the hand while he’s at it! Find him and bring me his right hand!”

_His right hand, the hand that strikes her, the hand that kills… someone… not-Justine… her daughter?_ He couldn’t be sure what the flash of insight showed. He could only suspect, strongly, that what it showed was not something that he could overcome. Immortals he and Lily might be together, but only one experience mattered to her now, and it had happened in her human life. Perhaps she would come to her senses before the last grain fell through the glass and their alliance fell away with the sand. More likely she would not, and he would be alone again, and everything would be just as it had been for all the centuries before. He certainly couldn’t allow it to change in the direction that it seemed she wanted it to, with her creating an immortal army, full of pedestrian, human grudges against him, in his very house.

And it was just possible that, in his loneliness and love of danger, he had waited to long, and nothing would ever be the same, except for the things that he despised.

He might wait longer. If he still had it in himself to feel hate, he would hate himself for that, too.

“Cut it off and hold it bleeding to your breast!” she shouted, to the cheering crowd. “Bring it here, fling it on this table, and we shall sing out _our_ joy! _Prove yourselves to me! Prove yourselves to me!_ Prove yourselves!”

**The pile** of right hands sitting on the dining-room table— and smoking, from where someone had left her cigarette amid the carnage— was really too much.

In the first place, Dorian had long ago learned better than to collect unpreserved hands in his own home. They would begin stinking within hours. In the second place, the table was a terrible location. Lily could have ordered all her ladies to collect men’s hands, given them an inspection, and thrown them in the Thames. She could have thrown the hands into a smokestack, or pickled them in jars and set them up in a dedicated room. God knew, they had space enough, even with all their guests. She could have even set her followers’ sights a little higher than chopping the hands off ordinary johns in back alleys. They could have overthrown Parliament by now, if she’d had the commitment for it.

Instead, she had ordered her followers to throw the men’s hands on Dorian’s favorite dining table. Aside from the display’s intrinsic ugliness, it seemed like a rather uncalled-for threat, considering how little effort she was making to distinguish him from mortal men in the minds of her followers.

It did not, however, appear to be shocking enough for the women, who lounged around in poses of sapphic titillation, which they obviously found far more daring than mutilation, murder, and the desecration of heretofore-tasteful home décor.

Remembering that time when everyone in southwest England had insisted that their church door was covered in a Daneskin, Dorian made his way through the gaudy and gruesome scene. He and Lily had a meeting scheduled, and this was all the more reason to keep it. They had never had a formal agenda, but hand bouquets were going on it this time, informality be damned.

Justine’s partner in necking wandered a few steps away. Dorian didn’t know if that qualified as “leaving” or not, in this milieu, and he didn’t care.

“Will you dance with me?” Justine asked, using her arsenic voice.

“I think you’re otherwise engaged,” he excused himself, with a smile.

“Ever so charming, aren’t you?” she asked, her squeaky voice shifting to as much of an open sneer as it could manage. “All charm and nothing but. Might come a day, my lad, when that ain’t enough.”

“And are you to choose that day?” he asked, curious as to how much initiative she would assign herself.

She smiled. “You wanted a killer. You’ve got her. Can’t go back now.”

If dealings with mortals could have given him headaches, he was sure he would have had one now. Justine reminded him of Junia Tertia, short-sighted and short-tempered, vaguely aware of the preternatural world, but unable to let that knowledge broaden her attitudes beyond the petty and the average. Unfortunately, they differed in one important way: Justine actually had courage. If Lily went through the plan to transform her, she would pose a real danger.

But he’d been around for millennia. He’d seen hundreds of real dangers. And right now, Justine was nothing but a gnat to be brushed away— and only that because she was such a disappointment.

_I welcomed you, do you not remember the blood, I would have made you special, we would have been everything, we would have ruled the world together, Lily and I, and you as our black-winged archangel,_ he thought, and felt irritated at his fancies. The smell of blood, of his Master, of his own hateful nature, tainted his thoughts. He felt as petty as Justine. He supposed he was. All those lifetimes, all those civilizations he had seen rise and fall, and he still found himself, time and again, trapped in ordinary rooms with ordinary people watching ordinary schemes die sordid, ugly deaths. When he was lucky, he got to be part of the ordinary, sordid, ugly schemes, over and over and over. That was all. That, and his conviction that he would suffer anything before he became anyone’s hapless minion again. His destiny had been taken from him, but his future would be his own.

He moved in close. “Listen to me, child. I can toss you out like the tiresome baggage you are whenever it pleases me. And don’t think for a moment that your tiresome sapphic escapades shock me. You think you’re bold? You think you know sin? You’re still learning the language. I wrote the bloody book.” Briefly, he took her by the throat, not hard enough to choke her, but fearlessly enough to let her know he could. Then he turned away to find Lily.

She was in another room occupied by silk-clad refugees, one of whom was sobbing into her lap. Dorian neither knew nor cared about the cause of her grief, but Lily was as determined to comfort her as a mother would be her own child. She rose to her feet when she saw Dorian, although her attention was all for her girls.

“I’m sorry, darling, but she’s very emotional right now, you understand?” she said, before shutting him out of the room.

_I understand,_ he thought, of Lily’s decision to abandon him, then, _No, I don’t_ , of her reasons. Why choose mortals, in their ongoing mortality, above the man who would have reigned beside her over the new aristocracy of the undying? There was little sense in puzzling over it. In her madness, she had wandered into tides he had no strength to swim.

He started to go, as would a chastened child, to his bedroom. But as he mounted the stairs, he realized something. The women’s madness had not only made them dangerous; it had made them weak. Everyone was busy drinking and smoking and replacing men in one another’s arms, and no one was paying attention to what Dorian Gray, a mere man, might do.

He stole away from his own house in the manner of a thief in the night, and no one missed the man who absconded with himself.

**Victor had** not told his associate about Dorian, and seemed not to have thought that Dorian, living in a house with a deranged immortal of Victor’s making, would have troubled himself to discover the location of Victor’s new lab. Dorian waited patiently through the unnecessarily long introduction, during which Victor could not hide his jealousy of Lily and Dr. Jekyll (presumably the scandalous half-breed heir of infamous rake Lord Hyde) could not hide his of Victor. The Indian glowered at Dorian for smiling, and shifted toward Victor when Dorian made to shake the pale youth’s hand, but proved easily mollified by Dorian’s admiration for his work. Although Dr. Jekyll’s easy distractibility amused Dorian, his flattery was more sincere than usual. It really was an impressive feat, if not one he thought would pose much of a challenge to an ancient like himself.

The doctors’ dramatics took a good fifteen minutes before they could even begin setting up their plan: The right place for the abduction, the right time, where to obtain the carriage. Dr. Jekyll offered up the use of his, or, to judge by his glee, his father’s, and added that he knew “very well” how to drive horses. Victor insisted that he could handle the tranquilizing solution without lapsing into unconsciousness or death himself; Dorian had his doubts, but decided that it made little difference, as long as Dorian were there to ensure that Lily breathed in her dose.

**It only** made sense to speak to Lily as if he wanted only to regain her commitment to their affair. It was inconspicuous to ask the questions that any man would ask of a lover who ignored him. It was good strategy to act as though he had never lost hope in their future, as though she would say something, even a word, to make it a possibility again, before it was to late.

It was fancy to imagine she’d change her heart, and pointless to bother goading her with the mad decisions she couldn’t see past. It was idiocy to still let the dreams of yesteryear puppet his body through a final test, even while his eyes saw clearly the truth of the future.

Perhaps it was simply human.

“I feel like I haven’t had a moment alone with you in weeks,” he told Lily, walking along one of the city’s less-fetid canals. Pretty lights, strung in abundance above them, filtered through the smoke and shimmered on the water.

“Sorry, darling, it’s been particularly mad,” she said, with a chuckle. He would’ve thought that he couldn’t bear her condescension, but the millennia had proven that he could, unfortunately, bear virtually anything.

“It has been mad, hasn’t it?” he asked, challenging her to acknowledge the weaknesses and insipidity of her charges compared to him. “We’ve unleashed the inmates, have we not? All the Bedlamites, come out to roost.”

“My women are not mad, Dorian,” she said, unyielding.

“Nor are they… ‘your’ women. More and more, you’re a lion tamer at the circus.”

“Oh! Spoken like a man,” Lily said. “All women are cats, is that it, and prone to backstabbing and treachery?”

Dorian didn’t give a damn about “all women” at the moment. Whether or not Lily realized it, she had become something else, and she concerned him more than her entire ridiculous parade of feathered revolutionaries. “Tell me,” he said, cutting to the heart of the matter, because the only thing more ridiculous than his romantic longings would have been denying them, “is it all mankind you despise, or just men? And when do you turn your eye on me?”

“Don’t be silly, you’re my beloved,” she said, turning to face him and putting a hand on his shoulder. Although he reciprocated, he suspected that she used her touch because her voice was unable to lie.

“Where are our dances in the midst of the revolution?” he pressed. “Where are our whispers and collusions? Our exalted superiority, shared with no others?”

“You’re not jealous?” she asked, laughing again.

“Sadly, no,” he answered, and the moment when he would have turned back crumbled away forever, become no more than the dirt drifting in the lazy current of the canal. “What I am is… bored.” He withdrew his hand from her, and in the moment before they turned away from one another and began walking again, Dorian leading her to the rendezvous point, he saw that she was stunned, then contemptuous. “I’ve lived through so many revolutions, you see. It’s all so… familiar to me. The wild eyes and zealous ardor, the irresponsibility and the clatter, the noise of it all, Lily! From the tumbrils on the way to the guillotine to the roaring mobs sacking the temples of Byzantium, _so much noise,_ and anarchy, and in the end, it’s all so… disappointing.”

“You’re behaving like a spoiled child,” she upbraided him, “which is exactly what you are.”

It was too late for her disapproval to affect him. “And you have disappointed me most of all. We had the potential for true mastery, a cosmic darkness. And what have you created? An army of depraved whores. A slave ship, bound for ruinous shores.”

“And will you be there when it founders?” she asked, oblivious to the familiar occupants of the carriage behind her.

“We’re at the ebb tide, my darling,” he said. “One of us needs to change our ways, and I think it should be you.”

Doctor Frankenstein moved surprisingly quickly, for a wheezing heroin addict. Of course, he would never have been fast enough, had Lily not cocooned herself— bound herself— in delusions of her own untouchability. As it was, Dorian had to help hold her until she had stopped shrieking through the cloth and collapsed, then assisted Victor (who, surprisingly, remained conscious) in bundling her into the carriage.

**_The enemy_** of my enemy, Dorian thought, standing beside Dr. Henry Jekyll on a balcony overlooking Victor and Lily in the basement of Bedlam House. Lily, chained to a chair, was just waking up; Dorian wondered how long it would be before she regained the strength to break her chains, but decided that, as long as he had time to destroy her military ambitions, that was the doctors’ problem.

“You’re safe,” Victor was attempting to assure her. To Dorian’s amusement, the young doctor seemed to find no irony at all in his choice of words.

“Hello, darling,” Dorian called down. “Glad to see you’re awake.”

Lily’s eyes filled with hatred. _“You._ You fucking cunt.”

“There, there,” Dorian said.

“You betrayed me!” she snarled. “You gave me to _him!”_ She leaped out of the chair, ignoring Victor’s protestations of weakness—

—Only to land prostrate on the floor at the end of her manacled ankle. It felt like a fitting position, for someone who had constantly betrayed Dorian for her pride.

He and Dr. Jekyll made their way down the steps and flanked Victor. Lily looked up at the three, mostly ignoring Henry, her expression warier now.

“You chained me,” she accused.

“It’s for your own good,” Victor replied.

_“It’s for yours.”_ She paused. “What are you going to do to me?”

“We’re going to make you better,” Dr. Jekyll said.

She shrugged. “Better than what?”

“He means we’re going to make you well,” explained Victor, which, Dorian suspected, cleared up absolutely nothing.

“As you were before,” Dorian said, deciding to play along with the doctors’ game of cryptic words.

“As I was _before what?”_

Victor knelt. “Before, when we were happy.”

“When _you_ were happy, you mean,” she spat back.

“Lily,” Victor murmured. “We’re going to try to make you healthy. Take away all your anger and pain, and replace them with something much better.”

“Replace them with what?” she asked.

“Calm, poise, serenity. We’re going to make you… into a proper woman.”

She began to shake, then. Dorian remembered rats being poured into dogs’ enclosures, the dogs and cats thrown to the old royal menagerie, soldiers awaiting amputations, women trapped by invading armies, even the pigs vivisected by Galen, screaming until the nerve to the throat was cut. The actors changed, but the stories stayed the same. This time, Lily herself had seen to that.

He might have stayed and watched the doctors’ new marvels work, but for two things. One was some profound change in the… the fabric of the city, if not the world. His Master’s magic, he thought. He was not exactly dizzy nor disoriented; he was reminded of exactly how hollow the victory in this room was, how small and brief, as a familiar mist melted into his pores. _The gray fog, the gray fog…_ Yet, at the same time, he knew that this had nothing to do with him. Nothing at all. He would resist any attempt to control him, but this was a matter for those with destinies, and he had none. He knew not where it ended, nor how it should, nor even if his Master were the conscious cause of it.

The second, and more immediate, concern was Lily’s army. It seemed a poor decision to wait for the young doctors muddle through various iterations of their treatment, while, at any time, Lily might regain her strength, escape, and rally her troops. She might even show the good sense to immortalize them, this time around— although he had credited her intellect too much before.

He felt hollow. The presence in London was to strong, too strange and too familiar at once. It reminded him too much of the gray fog that had poured into him, and the fullness that was so empty.

But he was still himself, hybrid creature that that was. He politely inquired into the work he could do to help in the laboratory, obeyed the instructions, and, once he had finished his part, picked up his coat from a chair. _One doesn’t go out without a coat…_ Well, perhaps he should. Perhaps he’d run through the streets again naked one day.

“Will you dance with me, Dorian?” Lily implored. She had collected herself and stood, straight as steel but somehow brittle, and not nearly as convincing a seductress as she believed.

“Another time, darling,” he said. “I have some housekeeping to attend to.” To Victor, he asked, “You will let me know how you get on here, Doctor?” If you survive.

“What? Oh, yes, yes,” Victor replied.

“One last kiss?” asked Lily, a simpering expression on her face.

Dorian took a moment to scoff at her limited repertoire before making his way out.

Indoors, the fog had been… metaphorical, or remembered, or _sensed,_ but as he reached the ventilation of the ground floor, he realized that it was a tangible, present substance. It didn’t seem to have any effect on him, perhaps because he was immune to magic and perhaps because he was immune to poison; but all around him, people were struggling to breathe through their handkerchiefs, some showing blood smeared around their mouths. The oldest parts of the city seemed to fare the worst; he didn’t knew why, but knew that he could walk through them now, unharmed and useless in the face of the pestilent air.

He made no effort to confront the source of the affliction, instead using his boundless stamina to destroy the beautiful resurrection room. He poured aqua regia— those years as an alchemist had been worth something— on the silver, on the tubes and wires, and even half dissolved the tub. Thousands of tiny, tangled Gs and Fs bubbled away, leaving behind ugly pits.

**It came** as no surprise that the women were throwing another one of their interminable dinner parties, at which more champagne than food was consumed. They were giggling and chatting and filling the room with a the smoke of competing drugs. Of all Lily’s flock, only Justine looked as if she had even noticed Lily’s absence.

Dorian espied the ice bucket and a pair of champagne flutes on a small side table. Taking a sip, he wished, again, that alcohol had effected him as it seemed to others. Regardless, it was time to have done with this nonsense and get these foolish children out of his house.

“Get out,” he said. He could have made a dramatic scene of tossing them out, but they didn’t merit it. “You may keep the gowns, the trinkets… Sell them, treasure them as forget-me-nots, take whatever you want, but leave this house, now.”

“Where’s Lily?” demanded Justine.

“Gone,” said Dorian, and he deigned to play with the girl. “Tamed. She’s Frankenstein’s now. His obedient bride. I gave her to him.”

Justine grabbed a knife and rushed at him, held it to his chest. “It’s not possible.”

“The miracles of the modern age. For all her fire, and all her furious power, your valiant leader was snuffed out by a few drops of liquid.”

“No man could defeat her!” snapped Justine, and she pushed the knife in. Dorian let her, partly because giving the others this show would get them out of the house faster, and partly because he could remember a time when Justine would have fascinated him. When, perhaps, he would have loved her.

Odd, and touching, he thought, that he found her at once so impressive and pathetic.

He withdrew the knife, to her shocked gaze; saw her realize that he was not, indeed, a man; and noticed the others sitting frozen at their grand table.

“Leave now, while I still allow it,” he commanded, projecting his voice through the room. Most of the women seized on this reprieve and scuttled away from the table, tawdry and stuporous in their opium-soaked silks and feathers.

Justine did not flee. She had always wanted to be an exception, and now perhaps she would be. She’d die before the others.

She stepped closer, close enough to kiss. He lowered his voice, to coax into thinking, not with Lily’s charisma and fury, not with the wine and drugs that were everywhere, but of what the girl named Justine really wanted, in the world where those were gone.

“In my time, I’ve seen a thousand Lilys, beating their breasts, burning too fiercely and too wild. I understand she dazzled you, but she’s gone now. Trust me when I tell you that you are lucky. You have glimpsed liberty. That is more than most will ever know.

“Go back to your short little life, or build a new one. I don’t care in the slightest.”

“I can’t go back,” she said, her voice trembling. “I can’t live that way again.”

“You will be surprised at what one can learn to live with.”

“I won’t go back,” she said, more steadily.

“The choice isn’t yours to make, child.”

“But it is. I would rather die here on my feet than live a lifetime on my knees.”

_God,_ she was so much like him, or at least like the will of what had once been human in him. _The choice I could never make._ “Do you mean that?”

She nodded, locking eyes with him.

“As you wish,” he said, his voice cracking, a shallow, painful cut. _I might have loved you, a thousand years ago. I might have loved you, were I not me._ He shut his eyes briefly and kissed her on her champagne-dry mouth. When he opened his eyes again, she still met his gaze. Her eyes still followed him, and she did not cry, as he turned her face to the side, farther and farther, until he heard her neck snap.

He felt her muscles go slack, but her stiff clothes and his arms supported her, so that she slid slowly and gracefully into his embrace. He held her as though they were dancing.

He could imagine a world in which she had been made immortal, trained to revel in her glorious future rather than to wallow in the muck of her wretched past. He could imagine her standing between him and Lily as their trusted lieutenant, their angel of death; he could imagine millennia of dances; he could glimpse them swirling through entire genres of music not to be invented for decades or centuries; he could see them ruling the world from glittering palaces and pristine factories and the splendor of sunset vistas. It would not happen. But it was sweet, just for the few minutes that it took for her to grow cool, to imagine. Poisonous, too, perhaps, but so had been Justine.


	10. Innocence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"You have to die to live forever."_ In Bronze Age Greece, young shepherd chooses a hero's immortality.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Because numerous wars, raids, and natural disasters devastated the Mediterranean world at the end of the Bronze Age, any story set in this timeframe must be highly speculative. Solid evidence, in the form of writing in other countries and pollen cores from the seabed, show that severe drought caused massive famine, with even olive trees declining in abundance. Earthquakes and volcanoes helped bring down the Cretan civilization; the mysterious Sea Peoples raided city after city; and literacy virtually disappeared in Greek society, leading to what we know as the Greek Dark Ages. Enough texts have survived that we know the worship of Dionysos dates back to the Bronze Age, and classical legends (e.g., Agamemnon and Iphigenia's story in the _Iliad_ ) hint at human sacrifice to at least some gods, a hint supported by modern archaeology.
> 
> Other aspects of the Bronze Age are less certain, and I admit to using a certain amount of historical license. The identity (or identities) of the late Bronze Age's most notorious pirates, now known as the Sea Peoples, remains a topic of academic debate. For the purposes of this story, I refer to them simply as "pirates." Further, Troy was sacked and rebuilt many times, and the Trojan War that we are most familiar with may have happened in the eleventh century B.C.E., rather than before Dorian/Poimen's human existence (as referenced in Chapter 6). While I haven't come across any hard evidence that Dionysos was, or for that matter was not, one of the gods to whom the Bronze Age Greeks sacrificed humans, he seemed so suited to function as the Master-on-Earth's disguise that I chose to portray his worship this way.
> 
> Of all the backstory chapters, this one involved the most research and the least certainty, despite being fairly short. I apologize for any glaring errors. If you inform me of any such errors and provide documentation in time, I will include a correction or note in my end notes (Chapter 12).

Iolkos, c. 1200 B.C.

**The drought** that had arrived in Poimen’s grandfather’s day had worsened unabated, and for the past three years, only one of Plouteus’s olive trees had even put forth leaves. This year, there were none. The tree no longer stood defiant and proud; it had joined its fellows in desiccation and death, its bare limbs frozen in their upraised pleading to the merciless sky.

Poimen’s family had fared better than most, due to Plouteus’s strange tolerance of their trespassing. Some of the grass was brittle and brown, but the demise of the orchards had opened up swathes of new, if lean, pastures.If Plouteus had not gone mad, insisting that the gods would bring his trees back to life, perhaps he would have invested in flocks as well.

As it was, the greatest olive-farmer in norther Iolkos wandered about his former orchard unwashed and in rags, calling out to gods who never listened. He seemed not to mind that Poimen grazed his flocks on his land without paying, perhaps because it gave him someone to chatter at and follow around, although Poimen wondered why he chased away all the other local shepherds. Ignoring his swollen knees and crooked toes, he followed Poimen about, climbing hillsides and spooking the herd with his cries.

Poimen collapsed against one of the dead trunks, not so much tired of walking as he was tired of listening. Sometimes the old man quieted down when they sat.

Plouteus didn’t quit talking, but he did lower his voice. “—And he has heard us, my son, Dionysos has come himself to bring new life to our lands with his own blood!”

Poimen played along with him. “Then I praise him.”

“Yes, yes, son, we all do,” the old man said. Poimen sometimes wondered if the old man called him “son” simply because of their different ages, or if Plouteus actually mistook Poimen for one of his own sons. They had been killed by raiders and his house burned to the ground before Poimen was born. Plouteus had never rebuilt on the ashes, preferring to wander the grounds, as if he could reject his humanity and become a spirit of the dying land. “But this is different,” he continued. “For years he has promised that he would come. And now, now, he is ready!” Plouteus grabbed both of Poimen’s hands, and his eyes brimmed with tears. “But he can only come if we help him, my son. He requires a sacrifice.”

“You’ll have to talk to my father,” Poimen deferred. He wondered if Plouteus actually had the money to purchase a sacrifice anymore. Rumor had it that the old man had stashed gold under every sapling he’d planted, but the occasional thieves who’d tried to dig it up had been disappointed.

“Not a sheep, my son,” Plouteus said. His age-clouded eyes were full of pity. “Not a sheep.”

“I know,” Poimen replied. “In the city, they’ve sacrificed a boy and a girl each year for the past three.” Of course Plouteus wouldn’t know what measures the folk were taking. He spent all his time railing at the trees, and, of course, at Poimen.

“And who did they sacrifice? Ha? Tell me that. Tell me, were they perfect, without blemish? Did the god himself select them?” Plouteus’s brown eyes always looked too big in his thin face, but now they had grown enormous, bulging and glazed. He was tanned as dark as an Egyptian, but his lips and the skin beneath his fingernails were pale, as though he had been drained of blood. Yet a strange fervor animated him; he could keep pace, shouting, with a healthy young shepherd, for hours on end.

“The king chose them from the finest youth in all of Iolkos,” Poimen reassured him.

“Ah! Ah! There you’re wrong, for they didn’t choose the one perfect boy. The god saw you, my son, and he demanded you.”

Poimen’s blood went cold, a dozen different feelings rushing through it to his brain. Plouteus wouldn’t do anything. No one would believe Plouteus if he did declare Poimen chosen. They might, if it meant saving their own sons. Poimen could remind them that Plouteus was mad. But did someone else deserve to die in his place? No, it wasn’t his place, that was just Plouteus’s raving. But someone would have to die, and was there any reason it shouldn’t be him.

Something more than that stirred inside himself, something more than compassion and courage. Curiosity, perhaps, and more than that, pride. He imagined himself as the savior of Iolkos, to be worshipped himself in ages to come. _You have to die to live forever,_ he thought, remembering the heroes of legends and their bloody ends.

It was a nice thought, but nonsense. He must be getting as mad as Plouteus.

“I’m sure our officials will know who he wants,” he said, shaken. For a moment, he had felt god-touched, chosen, but it had only been the weight of his own vanity pressing against him.

“No! Listen!” Plouteus said, his gnarled, spotted hands grabbing Poimen’s smooth, straight arms. “I saw him. Twenty-five years ago now, I saw him, in the days when I wandered about mourning my family, and I have never been the same. Don’t look so astonished! Just because I will always live in that glorious sight, doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten there’s a world around me.” His eyes went downcast for a moment. “I can never be of it again.

“Off to the northeast— you’ve been using my land for fifteen years, Poimen, surely you’ve found that little cave, not quite as big as my old house— my house— my house was gone!” He buried his face in Poimen’s tunic and began sobbing. Poimen, startled, could only stroke the old man’s matted hair with limited range of motion. “It’s all right, it’s over,” he tried to say, but Poimen would not listen. He sat back up, sniffling, the tempest over.

“I wandered in confusion for days. Not the past quarter of a century, like you all think, but I know it must have been days. I had no direction, no purpose. I thought of walking forever, until I reached some cliff from which I could throw myself, but I lacked the heart to pick a way. I found myself near the cave, and heard chanting, more beautiful than any human voice could make. It drew me to it, with its darkness as much as its beauty. It was the song of my heart, that I could never share.

“The singers were strange monsters, not quite in the shape of men and women. The man-things were tall and insectile, and covered in the writing of some strange language; but strangest was their eyes, solid black and fearless in a way no man ever is. Their skin was like parchment, and as they moved their mouths, I saw that they had fangs like needles in place of teeth. They never chant, they only sing. I know this, deep down, just as I know my own name and the name of my father.”

“The women were less outwardly transformed, but still strange, their skin and hair very white, their eyes red as blood still pouring from the throat. I would have been frightened, except that I knew that they knew my heart, for I had heard it in their song, and I could put my trust in them.

“None of the night creatures feared them, either. It was well before dawn, just as the stars were beginning to fade, and the bats headed out for their last feeding, unconcerned by the creatures or me. Wolves prowled in the area, and howled without fear of any greater predator. I had hoped that they would kill me, but they were too afraid. Though I felt like nothing but bones and grief, I must have smelled like a man, still.

“When they stopped their singing, I collapsed. Their song had given me strength, and in that brief time, I had forgotten how to stand on my own. I thought that surely I must be dying, or even already dead. In my heart, I felt a pain as sharp as a spear through me.

“And then he came to me, the god himself. I cannot describe him. The human mind has no words for it, the human tongue cannot shape a sound to suit him. He was a presence, not a man, mighty and overwhelming. I have never, not once, ceased to see him, to feel him, not in all the days and nights since. He always fills my thoughts, and I know not whether I should thank him for that mercy, or if I should long for the memories that cut my heart. In that moment, I knew that I was transformed. There was magic in him, and madness, and wonders, and things yet to come.

“And then he was looked like just a man, an ordinary man, whom you would only notice at the market or port for his kind smile and dignified bearing. Yet I could not forget what I had seen. I will never forget what I saw.

“I threw my face to his feet, begging him, whatever god he was, to bring them back to life, to give them back to me. There must be some purpose, some meaning, to such a visitation.

“‘Do you think that you can have life, only life, in this world?’ he said. ‘You have tended orchards and seen the butcher’s work. Your family matters no more than any other; I suffer, and your mortal realm suffers with me, and will until I am restored. Bring me the blood that I need, and I will share my life with the earth.’

“So you can see, Poimen, I have no choice, no choice at all!”

“No choice in what?” asked Poimen.

Plouteus’s hands squeezed bruises into Poimen’s flesh. “He needs a sacrifice, a perfect vessel for his magic. A perfect young man, ripe and unblemished.”

Poimen felt dizzy. Was the old man talking about him? Why was he even paying attention to Plouteus’s deranged tales?

“I have watched you, my son,” he said, weeping again, “since you were a boy. I let you use my land, I even chased away others who would have let their flocks eat the grass, so that you could have it all, and I did it because I had hopes for you. Now you have met them. Forgive me.”

“Sh, sh,” Poimen said, “it’s all right. I’m not angry with you.” He smiled, as reassuringly as he could, and tried to free his arms. As unthinkable as Plouteus attacking him was, part of his mind knew that now he had to think of it as possible. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to break the old man’s fingers, or even to scold him for his folly. Plouteus was Plouteus: Mad but kind, even, he thought, loving. “‘Perfect’? Really?” he teased, hoping to startle Plouteus into relaxing his grip.

“Perfect,” Plouteus said, “my son!” He let go and turned away, wailing as though mourning the dead. The sheep bleated anxiously and drew slowly together, trotting in a generally westward direction.

Poimen stood. Whatever else was happening, his flock was heading away from him, a comfortably mundane problem that he had to solve.

“I’m sorry, my friend,” he said, “but I must gather my sheep.”

As usual, Plouteus followed him. “I’m sorry, too, son,” he said, his voice cracking more harshly than usual, “but you won’t get far.”

Poimen should have heard the interloper’s footsteps in the dry grass, but his first inkling of another’s presence was the single hand clutching his right shoulder so tightly that he thought the bones might break, and lifting him up and turning him around.

He stared into an ordinary, unassuming face, one he would have passed by in the city without a second thought. Perhaps he would even have ignored the cruel desire in the stranger’s eyes. He had seen cruelty in the faces of men before.

He tried to scream, but the stranger moved his hand to his throat, and he couldn’t even breathe or think. A haze of red filled his vision, and his eyes felt as though they would burst.

“A pity to see you all red-eyed and purple-faced,” the man said, “but have no fear. It will heal when the spirit takes you.”

“Dionysos,” Poimen tried to mouth, to placate the god he’d failed to recognize.

“And others,” the god agreed, his voice now inhuman, filled with the rumbling, primeval tones of thunder. His grip relaxed just a little, not enough for Poimen to escape, but enough to relieve the throbbing pressure in his head.

“Did I not do well, my master?” came Plouteus’s voice. “Is he not, as I said, the perfect offering? Will you not bring them back to me?”

“Come here,” thundered Dionysos.

Plouteus approached. He kept moving toward Dionysos, within arm’s length, within a hand’s breath, until his face pressed to the god’s chest.

“My gratitude, child,” said Dionysos, and he bit into the old man’s throat.

Poimen had no idea how the god kept the blood from spilling, as his teeth looked like any man’s. Then again, he supposed that managing the inexplicable was part of godhead. He had more important questions. Should he struggle? Would his whole city pay for such impiety?

Plouteus’s drained body collapsed like an empty sack. Poimen made his decision.

“I shall follow your will,” he pledged.

The god gave him a scoffing look and drew Poimen to him before taking a leap of such power that, had he still been held only by his neck, it would have snapped. And suddenly it was not a simple man’s form that held him, but something indescribable, terrible and awe-inspiring, fire and smoke and fog and clearest air at once. He knew he must be screaming, but the greatest sound in his ears was a song in his mind, a chant that came from nowhere.

They were rushing at impossible speed through the orchard, leaping over the tops of the trees that still stood, the leaps crushing as they moved upward and dizzying as they swooped down. Poimen thought that his vision turned black, but he could not be sure, not with the monster’s image forever emblazoned inside his eyes. He heard screams and wondered if they were his, or if they were part of the horrifying chants and singing that emanated from some source beyond human imagining. Dionysos knew before Poimen did that the youth was about to retch, dropping him disgustedly to the cracked ground, one hand still bruising Poimen’s shoulders.

been in the cave in the cliffside since he was thirteen, when it had been filthy and stinking with the ordure of its nocturnal inhabitants. Now the floor that he fell onto was hard and dry, and there was no stench of the bats, although the cave was far from empty. Its walls reverberated with the chants of creatures he could not see, their voices so beautiful and so horrible at once that he could not imagine anyone hearing them and remaining sane.

A lamp sprang to life, and he could see the god and his servants. Through the dizziness and shock, he thought that the light should have upset the bats which still clustered, their fur burnished by the yellow glow, on the ceiling. In disguise, Dionysos looked as human as Poimen, but the servants were monsters and madmen: Parchment-skinned males and red-eyed females and obsequious, sickly creatures like Plouteus, with bloodless lips and ragged clothing. The unearthly minions remained standing in the face of their god and continued to chant; the sickly ones fell prostrate, whimpering.

On the far side of the cave lay a slab that had not been there when Poimen had visited the cave as a boy. It was not the altar one would expect a god to commission for himself; it was just a roughly-hewn rock with pits and bulges in its surface. At each corner stood one of the red-eyed women, a rope in her hands.

But they seemed ordinary and harmless, compared to the painting against the wall. A gray monster lurked inside it, writhing and hissing, its eyes almost as terrible as the undisguised visage of the god. Poimen could no more bear to look at them than he could forget the sight.

“You know it would be very unwise to resist me,” said the god, his voice a resonant purr. It sounded almost sweet. Poimen thought that he could never have heard the god’s voice above the chanting, except for its magic.

“You need a sacrifice,” Poimen managed to say. He thought of the cracked ground outside the cave, of the leafless trees and the brown grass and the sunken eyes of his cousin Eruthros’s children when they had moved into his father’s home.

Part of him wondered, _But why should it be me?_ Another part answered, _But why should it not be you?_

“I am ready,” he said. His voice sounded as thin and wavering as a child’s, but his purpose was firm.

_I will not die,_ he told himself, not really. _My body will end, but that is how heroes live forever. And what is one death, if it saves all of Iolkos?_

The ruby-eyed women reached out to him with ropes in their hands, and he lifted his wrists for them, his eyes on the altar where he would be sacrificed for the good of the earth.


	11. Always

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Epilogue. In 1893, Dorian watches the departure of one more lover.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Always" is the last chapter of this story as such, although there will be a twelfth chapter for end notes. This is probably the shortest entry, set during Dorian and Lily's final encounter of the show. As much as I wish more of Dorian's mysteries had been explained in canon, I thought this final moment was perfect in its own right, so there wasn't much to do. I hope I did the ironies and arrogance and self-loathing that we saw onscreen justice in my retelling from Dorian's POV.

**Justine lay** cold and small on the floor. Dorian knew that, if he looked closely, he would see her underside beginning to swell with pooling blood, that, had she lain in the open, her body would already have begun to attract carrion in the way a sleeping girl would not. Eventually he would have to clear her from the room, like meat left over at dinner. Perhaps he would bury her in a fine grave; perhaps he would have ceased to care, and would simply toss the sack of meat in the Thames. 

For now, he kept vigil. He had loved her, after all, or at least he had loved her, as much as he could, in that dream of a future where she had joined him in immortality. He recalled the night spent writhing in the blood of their conquests, the warmth of her, the supple firmness and the need, so unlike the cool flesh and blank eyes that were all that remained of her here. 

Was there more, somewhere else? He supposed so. He had seen wonders. But he did not understand them. It had never been his destiny to do so. 

Lily made no attempt at stealth as she walked toward them, her heels clicking against the floor. She had always been bold. Something about her had changed—had it been the doctor’s miracle of science? An epiphany original to her own mind?—, but not that. 

A passion had always burned within her, making her glow beyond the power of immortality. Now he sensed that she was full of ashes. It had been inevitable, he realized now, and it made no difference. She had never burned for him. 

He didn’t look up at her approach. He didn’t have to. He already knew that any smoldering heat left in the rubble of her heart was meant for the girl whose shell lay broken between them. 

“You would have been proud of her,” he said. “She remained your faithful acolyte until the end. She had no fear.” 

“The others?” 

“Gone,” said Dorian, and then realized that he could be more helpful than that. He changed his focus to the living. “To where they came from, I assume.” 

Lily knelt at the dead girl’s side. Her hand flinched when it touched the cold skin of Justine’s face, and Dorian thought of how young Lily truly was. Only her inhumanity separated her from childhood. “So my great enterprise comes to no more than this. One more dead child.” Whatever the doctors at Bedlam had or had not done to her, it had not extinguished her capacity for sorrow. 

“Be kind to yourself, Lily. Passion will undo the best of us and lead only to tragedy. It is ever thus for those who care so deeply.” 

“Better not to care at all, Dorian?” Lily looked at him, sullen. 

“In my experience.” 

“I don’t want to live like that.” Lily played with one of Justine’s arms, not as if the girl were a doll, but as if she were a living child, a baby, who could laugh at the motion. 

“You’ll learn to. In time.” In time, one could learn to live with anything, if it was their lot to change nothing. 

Lily remained in her huddle, grieving, as though she could have imagined a different end for a mortal companion, and Dorian realized the naïveté, that fragile blossom that might rot on the stem for centuries before it fell apart. It felt alien to Dorian, although he knew he himself had been the same. Instructing her would likelier than not prove useless, but he had to try. 

There had been no one to help, when he was transformed. 

“Do you not yet comprehend the wicked secret of the immortal? All age and die, save you.” _Save those few who never age, never grow, never die, never live. The perverse ones, the monsters._

_The great ones,_ he protested, but the thought rang in his mind: _“You have to die to live forever.”_ “All rot and fall to dust, save you. Any child you bear becomes a crone and perishes before your eyes. Any lover you take sinks into incontinence and bent, toothless senility. While you— only you— never age, never tire, never fade. Alone.” He stood. He felt his feet wandering the room, while his mind whirled in the trap, surrounded by the closest things he had found to creatures like himself, that would stay with him: Faces of oil and ocher and madder and ultramarine, spread across canvas by masters of old, helpless and passive, awaiting the centuries without blinking or resisting. “But in time, you’ll lose the desire for passion entirely, for connection with anyone, like a muscle that atrophies from lack of use. And one day, you’ll realize you’ve become like them: Beautiful and dead. You have become a perfect, unchanging portrait of yourself.” 

“An eternity without passion, without affection, caring for nothing?” Lily asked, as though he had suggested an option that she could simply reject in favor of happiness. 

He turned around to her, away from the hateful simulacra of humanity that were too much like him. “A small price to pay for such immortal perfection, isn’t it?” He wondered how much of that sweet, perfect boy from Iolkos was left in that smile. Not much, he supposed, and all too much. 

Lily seemed to come to herself, then. It might be a false strength, to collapse when her delusions of humanity slid from around it, but it gave her the strength to stand and smile. She walked to him and pressed her mouth to his, the touch almost chaste, the distance that her youthful follies put between them both nonsensical and beyond his ability to breach. He felt what was left of his heart being pulled into his lips, though, as she teased him with what could be and yet never was. For a moment, it felt true, it felt of promise and change; but those things were never true. 

“Goodbye, Dorian,” she said. “I hope they watch over you.” He thought that the pity and the mockery in her voice were both sincere. 

She walked away. It was to be expected, and besides, it was temporary. Some time in the millennia before them, they would drift together again, creatures of amber in a world of air. 

“You’ll be back,” he said, as she reset the gramophone for him without ever pausing or looking back, “and I’ll be here. I’ll always be here.” 

The music of wax rolled over the people of paint in the shrine to the perfect godling. It mingled with the fog that could not touch him, with the stench of the city in all its vile and tantalizing life and death, with the destinies of the era’s heroes. To anyone whose existence wasn’t itself a tomb, the light filtering through the haze of gray must have seemed inadequate, but that it actually meant anything for him was too much to hope. 

He stood still, between the wax and the fog, and waited for someone else to save or end the world as mortals knew it. 


	12. End Notes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Acknowledgments, sources, and odd thoughts I had during the writing process.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can find a much more comprehensive set of sources, with workable links, on my Tumblr: https://dreamsofghostsandstars.tumblr.com/post/154215363184/six-lovers-end-notes
> 
> Disclaimer: I own neither _Penny Dreadful_ nor anything original to it.

**Acknowledgements** Shout out to shadowsgiveusdepth for leaving an enthusiastic response to one of my Tumblr metas and accidentally jolting me into writing my first novel-length fic. Otherwise, I might still be quivering over whether or not to submit my short fics to public scrutiny. I'm also thankful to WynCatastrophe, who beta-ed the first four chapters and even caught a misquote from "Demimonde" in an early draft of "Someone Else."

 **The Wars of the Three Kingdoms** The Cromwell era seemed like a natural choice for a _Penny Dreadful_ flashback, given its importance in the Joan Clayton subplot. Unfortunately, while I know a good bit about art, music, and clothing during that period, I knew, and know, far less, about the political situation across the British Isles. (I didn't even know that the wars of the time had spread from Britain to Ireland. #Embarrassing.) Being a novice, I relied on encyclopedia articles for much of the information in "The Last of the Wick." Britannica's online articles proved particularly useful.

I felt it was important, in this first jump, to show Dorian at a critical moment. It's the last time he thinks of himself as a completely separate entity from the portrait. I symbolized this by having him use the last name "Leblanque," or "the White," in contrast to "the Gray," which matches the color of the creature in the painting. ("Henry," which he had taken from "Henri," was a reference to the influence of Lord Henry Wotton in Wilde's novel.) In later flashbacks (earlier, from his perspective), he's still holding onto the idea that he's somehow untainted by the demon. And I also wanted to show the effects of living as a preternatural creature for _so long._ Vanessa escaped villainy by death. What happens when that's not an option for a reluctant monster?

 **The medieval Islamic world** is not something I have great expertise in, either, but it didn't make sense for Dorian to simply ignore the world outside of Europe, especially given the importance of ancient Egyptian religion in the show's mythos. The House of Knowledge was, as far as I can tell, a real library that opened in Cairo early in the eleventh century, and it made sense as a place for him to look for texts on his maker. The Banu Sasan was also real-- sort of a pan-Islamic mafia that operated across political and linguistic divides, from Persia to Spain. Its members participated in pretty much every sort of moneymaking crime, including, according to one contemporary writer, robbing houses with the aid of candle-bearing tortoises as lanterns. Yes, really.

 **Ancient Rome** was a delight to write about, largely because I actually knew something about the topic. I wasn't sure how much of what I wrote would make sense to people who didn't take a particular interest in that time and place, but I didn't want to insult their intelligence by spelling everything out for them, either. Random notes: Ravenna, not Rome itself, had become the capitol of the western side of the empire by the fifth century; the story is set during the Goths' first siege of Rome (there was another a couple of years later); opals were possibly the most expensive gemstone in ancient Rome (see Victoria Findlay's fascinating _Jewels: A Secret History_ for a story about Mark Anthony's punishment of a man who wouldn't sell him an opal ring); and Junia Tertia is a call forward to Dorian's line, "Any child you bear becomes a crone and perishes before your eyes," from "The Blessed Dark."

 **The Greco-Bactrian Kingdom** made it into this story for a couple of reasons: First, it only made sense for someone as rootless and inquisitive as Dorian to travel, and second, I find it amazing how seldom anyone mentions it. Said kingdom was basically the grandbaby of Alexander the Great's conquests, located in the general vicinity of northern Afghanistan, and it lasted longer than it had any right to. It was also, as far as scholars know, the first country to mint coins containing nickel, although not the first country to use a nickel alloy for other purposes: China was already using "white copper" in weapons.

**The Mycenaean culture** wasn't the only potentially intriguing origin for Dorian, but it won out for a number of reasons. I wanted to make Dorian truly worthy of the term "ancient"; it coexisted with the heyday of Egyptian religion; and I had already locked Dorian into a Greek, or at least Greek-influenced, background with a reference to Dionysos in "The Master's Words." 

It's hard to overstate how disastrous the late Bronze Age was for the people living in it. A terrible drought lasted, not just for years or even decades, but for over a hundred years. Pollen from seabed cores show that even the Mediterranean region's olive trees struggled to survive. Pirates of still-debated origin, called the "Sea Peoples," sacked city after city. The region experienced an uptick in seismic activity, i.e., earthquakes and volcanoes. Literacy virtually disappeared in Greece for 200-300 years. Exactly which of these events caused what to happen, and how closely they were interrelated, remains subjects of debate. 

I liked the idea of Dorian having been a true believer at one point. After all, in the novel, he falls prey to temptation and manipulation; he wasn't always a killer. Here, I've made Dracula responsible for Dorian's fall from grace. Eventually, Dorian will learn to be _proud_ of how he differs from humans, but in the beginning, he thought he was dying a hero's death, like a character from a Bronze Age legend. 


End file.
